


Crooked Eyes

by Tawabids



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Disability, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Recovery, Survival, Torture, everybody lives au, tw: child death, tw: violence against a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:09:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <br/>
  <i>After Azog blinded him, the orcs left Kili by the fire for some hours.</i>
</p><p>Released by the enemy as a warning to the King under the Mountain, Kili has one day to reach Erebor in time to save the lives of his brother and uncle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the walk

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t had a go at writing properly dark fic for what feels like years, but I _knew_ that tBoFA would bring it out in me. 
> 
> Just to be clear, there is **no** major character death in this fic. It’s much more of a survival story.

After Azog blinded him, the orcs left Kili by the fire for some hours. He could have run then, perhaps. They hadn’t bound him, just dropped him facedown in the dirt and trampled grasses. The blood from his back was flowing freely and the shreds of his shirt stuck to his skin. He expected to be killed at any moment, dragged up and slit open from navel to throat, or at least kicked once or twice. No one touched him. He could have run.

But a blind dwarf can’t get very far in a ring of enemies.

He lay on his stomach where they’d left him. He couldn’t focus on any thought or sensation beyond the pain. He was aware that his skin was cold, that he was in the deepest hours of night. He could smell crushed dandelions nearby, trampled by orcish boots, or perhaps broken off their stems by Kili’s fingers when they’d first knocked him onto his face and he’d clawed at the earth, choking back his screams. At one point it all went quiet but for a few snores and the distant laughter of the guards at the edge of the camp.

Kili thought he was hearing things when the soft whisper of his name crept across the earth and into his chilled ears. “Kili. Kili. Kili, please.”

He realised at last that it was his brother. “Kili, just give me a sign you’re alive. Please. Please.”

He wanted to respond. He wanted to. But then the pain came back in a red flood that swept all his thoughts away again. He suspected that Fili wasn’t really expecting a reply. He’d never heard such despair in his brother’s voice. He must think the worst. Kili wanted to raise his hand towards the sound, as if to take hold of it and draw it in to warm him. He didn’t know exactly where it was coming from. He couldn’t remember where they’d left Fili, only that they had bound his brother by neck and wrists to a low, twisted beech tree so that he could neither stand nor kneel except with his back twisted at a cruel angle. Perhaps he was only a few feet away. Perhaps Kili could even find him in the blackness, ease his fears, touch him one last time. Or perhaps it was better to let him think it was over.

Perhaps it would be better if it was over.

Slowly, the insects went quiet and the birdsong started, though there was no light. There would never be light again. Kili tensed as he heard the clatter of armour being tugged on, of the footsteps of sleepy orcs shuffling around each other and their teeth tearing into bread and the flesh of the dwarves and ponies that had been with the brothers on their hunt. Kili shuddered when he heard the fire being stirred. But he was more afraid when he heard Azog’s voice barking at one of his lieutenants. Somehow he knew it was Azog, even if he couldn’t understand the black words, even if all the filthy monsters sounded the same.

He had only the warning of a few heavy boot-falls before someone grabbed his arm and hauled him a few inches up, shook him and dropped him on his face again. Kili stayed limp. He didn’t have the strength nor will to defend himself, and the orc wanted a reaction. He wouldn’t give it to them. He’d rather lie here until they ended him.

“Hey! Up, _snaga_!” the boot nudged his tender ribs, but not with any brutality. Still Kili didn’t move. Another orc’s feet stopped somewhere near his head. He heard an exasperated grunt and then sharp nails pinched the back of his hand. By instinct he tugged it towards his face, his dirt-caked fingers curling inwards, giving him away.

Azog snarled something impatient. With a grumble the two orcs grabbed Kili by the arms and hauled him onto his feet as if he weighed nothing. He felt the barely-clotted whiplashes on his back split like bursts of fire under his skin, and he stumbled as he took some of his weight on his own feet.

They dragged him across the camp, past the twisted beech tree, and he heard his brother’s parched voice. “Where are you taking him? Where are you going?” and then, growing rapidly fainter. “Take me, you sick piece of wet shit! Just do it to me instead!”

They made him walk down the hill for several minutes. With every step he tripped on grasses and rabbit-holes or was struck light-headed from pain and had to be wrenched upright again. They passed over a flatter piece of land, leaving the low copse of trees surrounding Red Hill, where Kili had found the camp last night, where he stupidly thought that he was fast enough and righteous enough to rescue his brother from under Azog’s nose.

It was only two years since the battle that had won them the mountain, two years since Azog had vanished with the remains of his army, leaving his son Bolg to die in the retreat. None of them thought Azog fully defeated. Everyone expected that his thirst for revenge would surely be fuelled tenfold. But still, there had been so much else to think about, a whole kingdom to rebuild, and neither he nor Fili liked to discuss their dark memories of the battle and Thorin's near-death at Bolg’s hands. Their uncle was healed and strong now, and with Mama by his side at last he was no longer reliant on his nephews to keep the company and Dain's dwarves in line. It had felt like a holiday when Thorin gave them permission to leave their work and go hunting for a few days with two new friends from the Iron Hills. They had not armed themselves for fighting, only for killing deer and wild pigs. How much trouble could four dwarves get into, so close to the mountain? It was a couple of hour's swift ride back to Erebor. They had felt safe. They had let their guard down. And Kili had walked away from the others to find a few more sticks for the fire, just for a moment, and suddenly Fili was screaming for him to run, run and hide, and there was the clash of steel and he ran—

Idiot. Idiot. Should have gone for help. Shouldn't have come back for Fili. They were going to kill him now.

Kili was afraid to die. The fear scythed away his pain and filled him with terrible awareness of every sound and smell in the air. They reached another slope, but after a few steps Azog called the orcs back up to the top again. Kili could hear the music of water; a thin, deep river, smelling of long miles stewing beneath the summer sun. It must be the small tributary into the River Running, the one he crept up last night to mask his scent from the wargs. His socks were still wet from wading. It was such a short time ago, really, but it felt like weeks. If they threw his body in the river it would come out in the Long Lake tomorrow, and someone might find him and recognise his home by the crest on his belt buckle. Unless his corpse soaked up enough water to sink first. 

But that didn’t seem like Azog’s style. Azog would want to make a proper statement of his death. Something far more terrible. 

Kili heard another barked order from the chieftain, and he was shoved down to sit on the lichen-covered rocks. Suddenly the orcs were clawing at his boots, holding his legs in place when he struggled weakly. Why did they want his boots? Were they going to send them to Thorin? His severed head seemed like a much more appropriate gift. His thoughts were too sluggish to figure it out, and in minutes he was dragged up again to stand barefoot in the cold, morning air. Someone seized his shoulders and forced him to turn. There was ragged breath on his cheeks, stinking and tinged with low laughter. He felt an iron claw in his hair, scraping across his scalp, and forced himself not to flinch.

Azog spoke, and one of the orcs that had accompanied them translated. “Do you want to go home, little worm?” When he didn’t answer a huge hand gripped the other side of his head, trapping his skull between itself and the iron claw. “Do you?”

“Yes,” Kili gasped, his teeth chattering in the cold air. He could hear Azog smirking as he replied.

“He says you’re free to go,” the orc explained.

“W-what?”

“Go home,” the orc sneered. “Go and tell the King Under the Mountain that Azog is merciful, and if Oakenshield wants his heir alive he will come back here to the Red Hill at noon tomorrow. If he does not come, or if he does not come alone, Azog will fuck your brother to death. Can you remember all that, you brainless speck?”

Kili nodded, but he couldn’t stop his limbs from shaking. “How?” he croaked.

“The mountain is right in front of your face, worm. Can’t you see it? Just go straight ahead,” the translator chuckled. Azog said something, low and lengthy, meant only for his soldier’s ears. There was a growl from one, and the chief barked a reprimand. Kili listened to him leave, stomping through the undergrowth towards the distant voices of the camp. The two lesser orcs remained.

“Must we?” one of them hissed to the other. “We’re supposed to go ourselves if he carks it? We’ll be hacked to pieces!”

“Not if they think the boy’s alive until the last minute,” the other snapped back. “Go get the wargs, I ain’t walking that whole way. Here, _flâgît_ , you’ll want this!”

Something struck Kili’s arm and clattered to the ground. He knew by the sound that it was a piece of thin wood, nothing more. 

Slowly, slowly, the truth of the situation took hold of Kili, like tar creeping through a mine unseen until it catches a fallen flame and fills the cave with an inferno. Erebor was twelve or thirteen miles away as the raven flew. He had no shoes, he had drunk no water for hours, and the sun was rising towards a day of hot winds. Azog expected him to walk across the tundra bleeding, blind, wandering in circles but stubborn as any dwarf, until he dropped dead. Then the two soldiers tailing him would take him back to Erebor, dump him at Thorin’s feet with the message and all his torments laid out clear for his uncle to see. Thorin would probably guess – as Kili knew, from what he heard last night – that they would never let Fili leave with his head on his shoulders. But his uncle would go to the Red Hill anyway. He would go because no hope has ever been too small for Thorin Oakenshield. No hope to save his remaining nephew would be too small to be worth the risk. And Kili would be dead and unable to help either of them.

Kili gagged. He bent his knees and squatted until he could feel on the ground for the stick that orc had thrown at him. It was almost as long as he was tall, curved along its length but dry and light, with a couple of offshoots that he snapped off quickly. A passable cane for a blind dwarf. He clenched his fists around its girth, feeling the bruises stretch across his knuckles where he’d fought with his hands after he had nothing else to fight with. And he thought—

_I can still save them both._

There was no decision to be made. He could stay here and die at once, or he could die on his feet trying to reach help. He had no hesitation. He felt for the hem of his shirt until he found a rip, took hold of it and tore a long strip around the whole circle. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he gently laid the cloth across the sockets of his eyes and pulled it just taut enough to bear before he tied it behind his head with stiff fingers.

One hand clutched the stick in front of him. The other stretched out to catch himself if he needed to. Kili began to walk.

 

\---

 

He took only a few steps in the direction that the orcs had pointed. He would never make it across the plains without guidance. But the river he knew. It was the only major creek that stood between here and Erebor, and it was not far from the main branch. He could follow it back to the River Running and then track that right up to the front door. It meant the route back would be almost a mile longer, true, but as long as he could hear the river on his left, then he would be led right to the front gate of the Lonely Mountain. He might – he tried not to get his hopes up – even be able to find the east track that ran beside the river along most of its length. It was a good way from the water and rarely used at this time of year; Kili was on the wrong side of the river for regular traffic. The fresh-cut road on the west bank encompassed outposts on Mirkwood, the growing towns around old Esgaroth, Dale, the Lonely Mountain, and even crossed the new bridge between Erebor’s southern arms and disappeared off into the eastern horizon. That was the road most people took between the lake and Erebor these days. The east road was only used by horse-traders from Rohan in autumn, and the odd spice-seller from Rhûn. But maybe he’d find it. Maybe some farmer would find him along its route, and help him.

But the river was the only friend he could rely on, and he had to keep it close. When he needed drinking water, it would be there as well.

Kili went to the top of the riverbank and a few steps further before he turned, shifting slowly until the sound of the rushing water was loudest in his left ear. He tapped the ground in front of him with his cane, feeling the soft bulges of knee-high grass, and harder lumps of earth-covered rocks. He took one blind step, then another, then another before he fell. He managed to catch himself on his free hand, but at once his stubbed toes throbbed and fresh pain shot up his knee to join the fresh sting on his back.

He heard the orcs laughing behind him. One called, “You’re going the wrong way, _snaga!_ ” Kili forced the jeers out of his mind. They were a bother only in that they blocked the sound of the river. He waited until they were silent and then raised himself gingerly back onto his feet, digging his toes into the dry, prickly grass until the pain in them subsided. He took another few steps.

The pace was so slow that it drove him half-mad. The temperature rose and the morning chorus changed to the odd lark singing over the buzz of midges. He fell frequently even when he thought he’d taken his time and tested the ground thoroughly. Soon his palms were scraped raw, his skin bruised and wrists aching from the constant impacts. His knees suffered as much, but at least they were protected somewhat by his thick trousers. His toes had no such luck. He wondered how Bilbo had made it all the way from the Shire in his bare feet and felt renewed wonder at the hobbit’s resilience. He didn't have time to get himself thick, hobbitish soles, so he took each step higher than felt natural – indeed, higher than he felt he had the energy to spare – and lowered them carefully until he knew where he was putting his weight. It was awkward and slow, but it reduced his stumbles to one in twenty steps instead of one in five.

Sometimes he could hear the orcs chattering behind him, but at last their voices disappeared. They must have left off and bedded down to avoid the sun, knowing their wargs could track him whenever they wished and he’d never get too far ahead. He had half expected them to spear him in the back if he made too much progress, but it occurred to him that it was in their interests for him to reach Erebor under his own strength. They did not want to get within arrow-range of the front gate while dragging a dead dwarf between them. That was perhaps why one of them had given him the stick as a cane. Kili just hoped they never considered what Azog would do to them if they let him enter Erebor alive.

On several occasions the pain overwhelmed him and he had to stop and grip the cane, digging it into the earth until it passed. Often his mind drifted away with the jerking rhythm of his steps and he came out of the delirium to find the sound of the river was almost too far away to hear, or he was jarred awake as he stumbled over the edge of the bank or into a sudden dip in the landscape. Several times his route was blocked by thick bushes or what seemed, to his probing stick, like bottomless ravines. Each obstacle took excruciatingly slow exploration with his hands and toes, often taking him far from the river until he found a way to crawl through or climb down.

On each occasion his heart began to race and his throat clog up at the fear that this time there would be no way through, or that he would lose the river and never find it again. More than once he heard himself whimpering in high, desperate mewls, his nose running and his lungs heaving. He never cried. Even if he could still cry, the drying blood had blocked his tears.

He reached the river fork, Wrencliffs Drop, by the time the sun was beating directly down on him. He knew the sound of the River Running by the deeper roar of water and the smell of colder peaks it carried with it. The smell of the mountain. He couldn’t be sure, but if the day was stretching into the late morning as the heat suggested, that meant he had taken four or more hours to travel only half a mile.

Kili allowed his shivering muscles a moment to sit, though he kept the cane upright as if afraid he would not have the strength to lift it again.

He couldn’t do it. He was more exhausted than he had ever felt in his life. He would never make it to Erebor, not even on his hands and knees. His throat felt like a wildfire had been through it; he’d drank a few sips of water from a warm pond he’d stumbled through some hours back, but it had tasted so foul he’d moved on. He regretted that beyond measure. He would drink that pool dry if he had it with him now. The sound of the rivers merging was alluring almost to the point of pleasure, but he was sure from how low they sounded that the banks here were far too steep to climb down in his state. If he overreached and was swept in, or if he put his foot through some weak overhang, or held onto a rotten branch that could not support his weight, that would be the end of it. He couldn't reach the water.

But he wasn't going to make it otherwise. He couldn’t take another step, let alone another twelve and a half miles.

He thought of Fili, of his brother smiling in the sunshine two days ago, with three rabbits hanging from his saddle. The world had seemed all golden and blue then, and home a warm, near comfort they would soon tumble proudly back to. He remembered with a shudder Fili’s hoarse yell from the orcish camp, when Kili had been skulking around the edges, searching for a weakness in the perimeter. The orcs had known he was tracking them; the wargs had smelled him and were straining at their leashes. But Azog wanted to draw him in, and had taken a burning brand to his brother until Fili had finally cried out in agony. And Kili, stupidly, fatally, had broken his cover without considering anything but his own rash need to reach his brother. He had already figured out the answer to the obvious question: why kill their companions at once and leave Fili alive at all? Because Azog needed a hostage. What he did not know Azog wanted, however, was someone on which to demonstrate what he did to hostages.

He thought of Fili now. Strung to the branches of that low tree in this hot sun, unable to even brush the flies from his face. Did Fili know he was alive? Probably not. At that thought, Kili’s blood surged in his veins and he gripped his cane and heaved himself to his feet. Every moment he sat here pitying himself was a moment that Fili hung on that tree, believing his brother was dead and waiting for his own death, knowing his uncle might join him when it finally came.

Kili could not forgive himself if he let that suffering go on a moment longer. He had to get home. He turned right, parallel to the river, knowing that he now faced the Lonely Mountain even though he would never see it again. He began to walk.

 

\---

 

It was even slower going along the River Running than it had been walking along the tributary. 

The foliage was thicker close to the roaring waters, even though Kili was now walking within the barren expanse of Smaug's old territory. In only two years since the dragon had died, whatever festering magic he'd cursed this land with had faded. They’d seen it on their hunt: wherever there was water, there were shivering tussocks and wild daisies, glowing buttercups, crawling junipers, thirsty willow-saplings and soft piles of sheep-mat.

But as he made his way upriver now, Kili seemed to encounter nothing but vicious gorse and broombush. The weedy shrubs had sprung up taller than an elf and were spread like a rash all round the river. Often Kili got partway through only to find the way so thoroughly blocked that he had to turn around and double back, sometimes several times until he feared he might not get out of the maze at all. When he managed to struggle through gaps, there were still growths of lance-grass and thistles that he couldn’t feel with his stick until he put his foot on them. Every time the spines dug into his skin he had to stop and find a safe place to sit until he could pick them out with shivering fingers, and each time he thought he wouldn't have the strength to stand up again. He was pressed to keep moving only because each time he stopped, flies would soon gather to the smell of blood, buzzing in his ears and landing on his bare, scabbed back, crawling across his cheeks to try and get beneath the bandages over his eyes (the place where his eyes had been, he corrected his thoughts). He could feel the blood cracking and flaking against his skin, but it was too tender and inflamed to touch. He waved the flies away and kept walking.

Kili could feel the slight rise to the land as the foothills around Erebor began to bulge up beneath the surface of the earth. He couldn't remember every inch of the landscape along the river – he had traveled this way only rarely in the past two years, because of how busy they had been inside the mountain. Even then he’d usually he’d been on the far bank. His greatest fear was that he would strike a proper hillock or an outcrop of rock that he couldn't climb, and be forced to leave the river to go round it. It would be so easy to walk too far in the wrong direction, lose the way and never find the water again.

He still hadn't found anything to drink. As the river got smaller, he was sure there would be a stream coming off the plains that he'd stumble through. He could imagine it in the blackness, cool water to gulp until his stomach hurt. A fresh pool to soak his aching feet. He'd do anything for a bowl of water right now. 

He bumped against a boulder while trying to avoid a particularly vicious scatter of gorse and put his hand out to keep from falling. When his scraped palm met the bare rock he nearly cried out. It felt like the granite of Erebor, that strong base on which the kingdom had been built. Kili was a dwarf lad raised by a surveyor-trained mother and a smithy uncle and knew stone as well as he knew his own skin. This was the same vein of rock that ran across the north and rose up into the great peak of his forefathers. A small island of home in the plains.

He felt his way around the boulder and then sat himself down on it, clutching his stick to keep from tumbling over. 

He was beginning to fear one outcome worse than any other. He was travelling so slowly that even if he survived this journey, he might not reach Erebor by noon tomorrow. The sun was already warming his left cheek far more than the right. It must be the afternoon, which meant he had less than a day to warn Thorin of everything that had happened and would happen. If he failed – if he reached Thorin too late – Azog would not hesitate to kill his brother. Kili pressed his hand to his forehead and sobbed. Perhaps he should wait here to die. It was so tempting to give in to exhaustion and pain. He could wait for the orcs on their wargs to hunt him down and take his body back to his uncle, and the ransom message with it. It would be much faster, even if they didn't come looking for him until after nightfall. There might be more time for Thorin to prepare a rescue. The royal family might only lose one dwarf today, and not one of the most important ones. They'd miss him, but at least they'd be alive _to_ miss him, and at least Mama wouldn't have to grieve all of them from one blow. 

Except for Tauriel; she would miss Kili regardless, and take little comfort in the survival of his kin. She did her best to respect and obey Thorin, an obtrusive but generally helpful member of his court. And Kili thought she was almost growing to love Fili. But in an absent-minded, elvish way – and despite her deep, earnest desire to protect every creature she crossed paths with – she still seemed to have trouble keeping track of the affairs of most mortals. Kili was the one, dazzling exception.

But he had barely thought of Tauriel from the moment Fili screamed at him to run, and forced himself not to think of her at all after he'd been captured. She was not the priority right now. And even if he returned to her, everything would be different. 

They had had a bit of a spat last week, in fact, because Tauriel had gotten Dain's son Thorin mixed up with Dain's nephew-in-law, Ginnar, and called them by the wrong names in the middle of quite an important meeting. Thranduil was visiting King Bard this week, and his ex-captain was now on speaking terms with her ex-king, so Thorin kept sending her off to give Thranduil reports on how well Erebor was growing without Mirkwood’s help. Though they had made no threats against each other for two years, the war Thorin had declared between Erebor and Mirkwood had never officially been called off, only postponed. (Kili could not tell if Thorin was hoping Tauriel would get homesick and break it off with his nephew or whether he was using her as a jibe to remind Thranduil that one of his closest servants had abandoned him for a dwarf). Kili knew that Tauriel considered it a great honour to become integral in the relationship between Erebor and Mirkwood, but still, she didn’t seem to take her place on Thorin’s council as seriously as Kili would have liked.

When Tauriel called the younger Thorin but the wrong name, the elders in the meeting had gone quiet; Thorin had looked at Kili with such dry disappointment in his eyes that Kili had flushed red and pulled Tauriel out of the room, suggesting she go spend some time at the archery range until the meeting was over. When he'd explained why, she'd been stiffly embarrassed and insisted it wasn't her fault that she couldn't tell dwarves apart when she'd only just met them, and Kili had snapped that it bloody well _was_ her fault because she'd been introduced to Ginnar at _least_ half a dozen times, and young Thorin had been living in the mountain for over a _year_ , so it was disgraceful. Tauriel had stormed off without a word and not spoken to him again before she left for Dale. After she'd left, Kili had furiously told Fili that he hoped Thranduil _did_ finally forgive Tauriel and take her back to the forest. Fili had said he didn't mean that and that he should write her an apology before they went hunting. Kili had refused. 

And now Ginnar was dead, cut up into pieces and roasted on skewers by Azog's soldiers, and Kili would probably die before he could offer Tauriel any kind of apology at all.

He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He wondered if Tauriel was back from Dale yet. He'd never see her face again, one way or another. But he could still tell her he was sorry for calling her disgraceful. He had to. He loved her. He couldn't let her think he'd died angry at her. 

He got off the rock and stretched the stick out in front of him, stepping forward with each heaving breath. When his cane met empty air, he was too distracted to notice. He put his foot over the edge before he knew anything else had gone wrong.

He fell forward several inches and his sole hit a floor of tiny stones, jarring his knee so hard the impact clacked his teeth together. Far too exhausted to catch his balance, he just kept going and fell straight forward onto his face, spraying stones in all directions. The pebbles were so tiny that it was a relatively soft landing, but it left his head spinning and the gashes on his back burning afresh. He lay there for some time. One of his hands dug into the stones, confused by their size and smoothness. They must have been worn down by pounding water.

A beach.

He was lying on a beach.

Kili raised his head with a gasp. A beach meant a smooth incline to a quiet bend in the river. With a groan he pushed himself onto all fours and crawled towards the sound of the torrent. In moments his hand plunged into frigid waters and he almost collapsed into their embrace. Water. Clean, fresh water from Erebor. He cupped his hands and drunk. He could almost taste the forges.

He drunk until he thought he was almost sick and then lay on his back on the beach waiting for his stomach to stop cramping. When he could sit up, he washed as much dirt and blood as he could from his feet, giving him a chance to get at a couple of thorns that had been too deep or caked in filth to find. He ripped another strip from his shirt and used it to clean the worst of the blood from his face and the places on his back that he could reach, wiping carefully around the whip-marks as best he could. It occurred to him at last that if he turned his shirt around, the intact front would cover the wounds on his back and at least protect them from the dust and the flies. It would be horrid peeling it off again later, but that was one problem he would not have to worry about until he reached home.

Kili’s head was beginning to clear at last. He felt immensely stronger now that the thirst was no longer pounding through his skull. He felt around until he found his stick and climbed up the far bank of the little beach. There was a mass of gorse on the far side, but he picked his away around it with fresh speed.

He just had to keep going. Just a hundred more steps, he told himself, and when he reached a hundred he let himself pause and let the pain wash over him for a moment, and then made himself do a hundred more. The river roared endlessly on his left.

He was going to make it.

He had to make it.

 

\---

 

Kili’s second bit of luck came not long after the beach. He’d found a clear route between boulders and bushes that took only a little sweeping about for the way forward. It let him shuffle on with little resistance for some time, and he got so into the rhythm of it that it took him a while to realise he was walking on packed earth.

He stopped dead still at last, cane pressed to a clear point ahead, and then crouched onto his knees, sliding his hands across the ground. There was no doubt. The soil was worn to hardness, covered only with a few dead leaves, the grasses growing low or not at all on the edges. It could be a dry streambed, but there was no hollow in the centre and it was the perfect width for something else.

He’d found the path on the east bank.

Kili let out a low, hiccoughing laugh. He leaned down and kissed the dirt, his chest heaving. He scrambled up again so quickly he had to grip his cane from the rush of dizziness.

His speed after that was unimaginable compared to the toiling, inch-by-inch shuffle of before. He still had to be careful about each step, still had to tap and sweep the ground ahead at every moment, but it was an improvement beyond what he could have hoped for. Sometimes the path thinned or almost disappeared beneath his feet, but he followed the lay of the land and always picked it up again before long. And to his relief, he could still hear the river on his left.

The air was beginning to chill as he went. Several times he became alarmed at the thought of walking after dark, and then every time he shook himself. It would not get any darker. The world was as dark now as it would ever be, and no sunrise would fix it. The cold was another worry, but the summer nights had been gentle enough in the last few days and as long as he kept moving, he’d keep warm. And though he must make easy prey, there was nothing out here that would attack him except mosquitoes, unless he stumbled right over a particularly grouchy pig.

What Kili wanted more than anything was to sleep, even for a few minutes, but he forced the thought away over and over. Even if the pain from his wounds didn’t keep him awake, there was no way to be sure his sleep would be short. If he lay down by the path he might pass out for hours, or for the whole night. He didn’t have time to spare. He had to keep going.

Slowly the sun’s warmth crept away and the chittering of insects and night-birds started up. Kili walked on. It was almost a game, tricking himself into going just a little further. Just a little further more. Not far now, he promised himself. 

He didn't try and guess how many paces he'd travelled, how many miles remained between him and the mountain. He thought only of the steps right in front of him. He didn’t think about the end either, about food or warm blankets or the voice of his mother. If he thought about good things, the full horror of his state and the weight of his task would destroy him. His strength would crumble. He’d never get up again.

He thought only about staying on the path, about the sound of the river, and about how he just had to make it a little bit further. A little bit further. A little bit further. 

 

\---

 

Kili heard a warg howling not long after nightfall. For a moment he stopped, shivering, imagining a wild pack sniffing his blood on the air. But it had to be the two orcs tailing him. Wild wargs hadn't been seen around the mountain even once since the dwarves took it back, and Bard always said they had been rare in these parts since he was a boy. There wasn't enough big game on the plains. Smaug had eaten it all.

About an hour later the wargs found him. Their paws were almost silent, but the orcs were making no attempt to hide their approach. He could hear them singing bawdily and smashing the brush with their scimitars. His legs shaking, Kili tried to speed up, just as the thud of heavy paws on packed earth began to grow behind him.

His heart thumping, he began to run, stumbling on roots and stones, his aching feet flaring up. Before he'd taken even a few steps, he heard the crunch of a rider through the broombush ahead and the low, throaty bark of a warg on the hunt. He could even smell the stink of its breath as it surged towards him. Kili raised the stick in both hands and his heel hit a twist in the path, sending him tumbling backwards. He landed on his rear and elbows, just keeping his injured back from slamming into the ground, but for a moment could only freeze and listen as the warg's rumbling snarl drew closer. The orcs were bantering with each other in their own language, laughing at him. One behind, one in front. Nowhere to run unless he left the path.

Kili had never felt so helpless in all his life, not even when they had pinned him down by the fire and Azog had approached him with the blunted knife, not ever. He wanted to strike out wildly with the stick, hopefully do some damage before they ripped his throat out. For long seconds the craggy laughter of the orcs was drawn on, deafening in his ears after hours of straining to hear only the river and the birds. 

And then Kili thought, _I don't care about these beasts. Azog told them to watch me, not hurt me. If they were going to kill me they'd be doing it right now._

They were just another obstacle in the darkness.

Slowly, one hand still grasping his stick, he sat up and pushed himself into a crouch. He could hear the warg's growl rise, desperate to rip him to shreds, but its rider had it under control. It wouldn't attack unless he ran and its instinct to chase and kill overwhelmed its beaten-in obedience. Kili stood up inch by inch, facing right where he thought the warg and the orc must be. 

"Go on!" a harsh voice rung out behind him. "Try and fight, dirty, blind worm!"

The orc in front of him sniggered. "Do it! Do it! Hit me with your little twig!" 

Kili lifted his hands to his face and tugged the bandage from his eyes. He turned the empty sockets towards the sound of the orc's voice. The laughter fell silent. He stood there for a moment, the bandage hanging from the hand in which he clutched his cane, and then he stretched out his arm and began to walk. 

He could feel the warg's hot breath on his palm. He walked towards it. It huffed, and then the breath was gone and he heard its paws shifting on the earth. Kili kept going, step by step, sweeping the tip of the stick side to side in small movements. The warg kept backing up, and then its breathing moved to one side. He walked past it. At one point he and the beast were so closely crammed together on the tiny path that its fur brushed the tips of his fingers and his side slid along its panting ribs, but it shied away at once.

The orc above him muttered and spat at him. It splattered on Kili's shoulder and a warm, sticky glob slipped over his bare collarbone. He did not react. It didn't matter. Only the sound of the river mattered, and the packed earth beneath his feet.

He heard the orcs following him for some time, hissing to each other with indecision. He did not turn towards them. He kept walking, pausing only to fasten the bandage back over his eyes. His hunters fell back at last, and he was left alone. 

 

\---

 

Kili's head was too heavy to hold up. He swayed as he walked, head nodding, chin almost bumping against his chest. 

The night stretched on. Kili thought about the stars, and the elvish names Tauriel had been teaching him. There had been evenings he'd lain beside her and reached out, sure he could touch their cold, distant points and feel in his hands the joy her people felt for them. He'd never know stars again. The beauty of light and colours would be memories forever. 

Fili started speaking to him some hours after the sun went down. His voice was inside Kili’s head, but it was as clear as if he stood beside him. 

"You're going to make it, brother," he said, sounding almost exasperated. "It can't be much further."

"I won't," Kili whispered to himself, flinching at the sound of his own voice. It was weak and hoarse. He barely recognised it. 

"Don't be a duffer!" Fili insisted. "This little stroll by the river is nothing. Thorin walked from Erebor to the Blue Mountains when he was your age. Dwarves don't falter. Dwarves don't stop for anything."

"It took them decades to reach the Blue Mountains. I'm going to be too late," Kili shook his head. "He'll kill you first."

"Have you ever thought, Kili, that maybe it doesn't matter what happens to me?" Fili's voice hummed in his ears. "That maybe you should keep walking so that _you_ can live?"

"I'd rather die with you."

"No one wants that but you. You and Azog. That's why he put you out here. Are you going to let Azog get his way? Are you going to let him kill you by inches?" Fili sounded so clear now that in the utter blackness Kili could see him walking by his side, arms swinging, his hair turned silver as if by the light of the stars. "You have to live. Thorin and I aren't important. There's nothing you can do for either of us right now. You have to get home so that you can live."

"You are important," Kili whispered. "You're more important than anything."

"Not today," Fili said softly in his ear. "Not now. Not for you. You are the world now. Your life is the only thing that matters," the voice was growing softer as if Fili was being drawn away, deeper into the darkness. "Survive. For survival's sake. There is nothing else, brother."

Then there was silence, not even the hoot of an owl.

"I want to live," Kili answered the darkness. 

 

\---

 

When he heard the dawn chorus strike up again, Kili's fear began to rise in him like a slow tide. Today was the last day. Noon was coming. He wished he could slow the sun, or hide it behind stormclouds so that not even the elves would see its light. 

He tried to hurry, but the slope was steeper than ever. The land had grown rockier, large stones waiting in the path to stub his toes or knock him down if his stick didn't find them first. He was sure the river's song was quieter now than it had been. It still rushed and gurgled at the edge of his perception, swifter and lighter like a dancer picking up a jaunty tune, but it was carrying less water than before. He had crossed two or three tiny streams, barely above his ankles, the water cold enough to bite his skin and his scratches before it soothed both them and his thirst. At least the broombush and thistles were gone, though with them had fled all their protection: the wind was stronger now, and tinged with the cold bite of snow.

He had lost the path sometime around the first rays of the sun. It must turn off from the river, wending its own way – probably an easier way – up the valley towards some secret place of its own. Without much foliage, it was harder to tell dry earth and bare flakes of stone from those packed down by feet and hooves, so he wasn't even sure when it had abandoned him. 

He found himself facing a cliff once, with the sound of a large, tumbling waterfall on his left. He knew this place, unimaginatively named Dwarrow's Fall, but he could not remember how high the cliff was or what hazards it presented. When he placed his hands on it, he found it was not sheer, and the holds were large and sturdy. He climbed, feeling with agonising slowness for every hold with fingers and toes while his remaining limbs shook from the exertion. As he went he was struck by a strange, sightless vertigo without solid earth beneath him. He started to think that if he let go of the cliff he would simply float away like a dandelion seed on the wind. But after perhaps a distance two or three times his height, the cliff softened into a grassy slope and he found an easy way along the river.

He walked, the sun beginning to warm his face, and he walked.

When the grass beneath him gave way to bare dirt he thought little of it, but when the dirt turned to small, jagged rocks it was only two or three steps before despair overwhelmed him. He put his weight on his next foot as slowly as he could, but it was little relief. His bare, tortured soles were screaming. He couldn't withstand the new, sudden pain after the relative ease of the dry, prickly grass. With a soft gasp, he knelt and fell onto his hands and knees, digging his fingers around a handful of stones. 

But he knew these stones. 

Kili lifted the handful, turning his palm over until the gravel ran through his fingers. These were the crushed stones at the head of the valley, laid on the road into the mountain to keep it from being worn away by rain and traffic. 

The gate was near. The door to Erebor must be less than a quarter mile ahead of him, slightly to his right.

Kili raised his head. He couldn't stand, but he could crawl, putting as little weight as possible on any part of his body. How early was it? There must be dwarves going in and out the front gate, they would see him soon, they must see him. How often did any dwarf have reason to leave Erebor? Once or twice a day, perhaps. But then again – desperately, his mind scrabbled for hope – somebody must have noticed by now that the hunting team was late home. There would be search parties sent out. Watchmen at the windows, with horns at their side ready to blow an alarm. Someone. Anyone.

Kili felt his elbows beginning to tremble. His knees had been bashed and scraped so many times that they were a single mass of stings and bruises. He could hear his heartbeat too loud in his ears, a great drum that felt like a physical blow with each surge of blood. He fell forward, caught himself and began to crawl again. He had to reach the gate. He had to save Fili. He had to make up with Tauriel. He wanted to live. He had not walked all this way, gone through all this pain, only to die _five hundred feet from safety, curse it all!_

He fell again, and this time pushed himself upright and sat back on his heels. His hands hung limp between his knees. He tipped his head back towards the sun. He mouthed the prayer, throat too dry to speak, "I want to live."

And out of the darkness a rough, nasal voice called, "Oi! Who's out there?"

Kili throat closed up. He couldn't breathe, trying to quiet even his heart. Had he really heard that?

"Hey, you! What are you doing down there?"

He knew that voice. Of all the people to be on watch-duty today, of all the many dwarves inside the mountain, it was the last person he'd had expected. Kili opened his mouth and raised his hand towards the sound, sucking for air, trying to swallow. "Help!" he croaked, too soft for anyone to hear. "Please, help!"

"I'll call the guard out on you, begger!"

"Nori, it's me!" Kili screamed, and at last, a full, raw voice emerged from his throat. "It's Kili! I'm here!"

And at last he heard a vicious, shocked curse across the distance between him and the ramparts of the watchtower. Kili let his arm drop. His ears were full of the pulse of blood and high, white ringing. He waited, swaying in and out of wakefulness, no longer counting the minutes. And then above the ringing came the creak of a great gate being levered open, and a multitude of heavy footsteps, and stout creatures running in heavy clothes, his people, his friends, they were coming—  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _'Faithful heart may have forward tongue.'_  
>  'Say also,' said Gandalf, 'that to crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.'  
> -The Two Towers, Chapter VI: The King of the Golden Hall


	2. the negotiation

—voices, gasps, questions he did not even have the strength to process, and then hands gently taking hold of his arms and legs, lifting him off the sharp stones and into more than half a dozen encircling arms. The wounds on his back were discovered with a sharp cry, carefully avoided as he was carried forward in uneven, hurried steps towards the cool shade of Erebor. There were shouts, someone running ahead to fetch more help. He was lowered from their shoulders so a hand could press a cup to his lips and it took him a moment before he remembered how to drink, before he could extract one arm enough to seize hold of the water and gulp every drop—

"Get him downstairs, get him to the physicians."

"Oh, lad… your poor feet…"

"What happened?"

"Who did this?"

"Get him some brandy, for pity's sake, let him sleep!"

"No!" Kili struggled, pushed back against the hands, his voice soft as a dandelion among their rough plaintives. "Find Thorin! I must speak with Thorin!"

"He's coming, lad, he'll meet you when the healers have you," It was Balin, dear, old Balin, his voice like a cool cloth on Kili's skin. Suddenly Kili knew it was all real, he hadn't fallen asleep on the mountainside nor been carried away by dreams, nor death. Kili reached out towards the voice and seized a handful of what he hoped was Balin's beard, dragging him close so he could hear every word from Kili's lips.

"There isn't time. Get Thorin now."

And behind at least two pairs of approaching footsteps, a deep bellow filled the chamber. "I'm here, Kili."

 

\---

 

It was Ori who had brought Thorin down to front hall. Thorin had been in deep discussion with Dain, who had just returned from the Iron Hills after a year in his own home. Thorin had been keen for a drink and a gossip from the moment his cousin rode through the gate last week, but it had taken this long because Thorin was too busy to sleep most days, especially with the lads on their hunting holiday instead of running around helping their uncle. Finally, he'd managed to send the rest of his retainers, advisers and clerks away. He shut the door of his chambers so he and Dain could have a little privacy.

When the knock came just after Thorin had poured Dain his second pint, Thorin roared, “I said no interruptions!”

“Excuse me.” A large, instantly recognisable nose poked around the door. “Excuse me, Thorin, I'm so sorry, but I think you should... er…”

Thorin was fond of Ori; everybody was fond of Ori, really, though Ori himself would never have believed it. There was no quality more admirable in a dwarf than one who stood up to the odds, and since pretty much all the odds in Ori's life had been against him from the moment he was born, he'd had plenty of opportunities to show his quality. But despite sharing in all their adventures for months and following them into battle, he'd never quite lost his awe and timidity around the royal family. The idea of him interrupting Thorin in his private quarters was simply unthinkable, except in circumstances most dire.

Thorin stood up and waved for Dain to stay. "I'll see what this is and be back in a moment, cousin."

Ori barely gave him time to put his coat on. Thorin almost had to run to catch up with the young dwarf, who glanced back only briefly to make sure his king was following. Thorin growled, "Give me the short of it, Ori."

When Ori slowed down and looked back at him this time, Thorin was shaken to see that there were tears in his eyes. He mumbled, "Kili's come back, Thorin. He's not in a good way."

Thorin's chest tightened. What did that mean? He thought of deer with sharp antlers, plenty strong enough to gore open vital organs, and how foolish his younger nephew could be when he was showing off. Surely he'd grown out of that nonsense since they'd retaken Erebor. Much as Thorin was loathe to admit, the elf woman's presence also seemed to have done wonders for Kili's focus in the last couple of years. After all they’d been through, Kili chose now to throw himself back into danger? 

_Witless little hound!_ Thorin muttered a curse and hurried on into the hall where there had gathered a melancholy, whispering cluster. Thorin’s gut clenched. The crowd parted in front of him to reveal a knot of dwarves carrying a prone figure.

Thorin's breath left him and he lost a few moments in the confusion, not even sure whether he'd spoken or not. Kili lay almost motionless in a sling of arms, his shirt torn to bloody ribbons and somehow on backwards, his boots missing and the knees of his trousers torn. His feet were filthy with blood and dirt and all his exposed skin was feverishly red from sunburn. The top half of his face was hidden by a strip of foul cloth. Balin's arm cradled his head like a newborn with a weak neck. Kili's hand was tangled in Balin's beard. For one icy moment Thorin thought he was looking at a corpse, but then Kili raised his head at his approach.

Thorin swallowed and found his voice. "Where are the others?" 

"He just keeps saying he needs you," Balin answered stiffly, and Kili was indeed reaching towards Thorin, demanding to be set down, trying to kick free of the hands that held him up. Thorin nodded at the dwarves and they eased his nephew back onto his wrecked feet. Kili couldn't stand. He tumbled forward and Thorin caught him and lowered them both to the flagstones, arms around Kili's waist and shoulders. 

He felt too light, perhaps because of his missing clothes, perhaps from thirst alone. He clutched blindly at his uncle's lapels, tugging Thorin's ear down to his mouth, and rasped eight terrible words that stained the inside of Thorin’s skull.

"Ginnar and Jor are dead. Azog has Fili."

Thorin was glad, now, that he was kneeling on solid ground. He didn't need his subjects to see him stagger as his blood thickened in his ears. His thoughts scattered in all directions, and he focused only on the one right in front of his face. "Kili, we need to get you to Oin."

"No. No. Listen to me." Kili gripped Thorin's arm so tight it hurt through three layers of cloth. "What time is it? What time?"

Thorin shook his head, frowning. He shifted his grip to support Kili with one arm, raising his hand to push tangled knots of hair back from Kili's face. As he touched the filthy bandage, Kili grabbed his hand. "Thorin, tell me!"

"I don't know." Thorin glanced up at Balin, who was leaning over them both. 

Balin supplied, "It's almost nine in the morning, or thereabouts."

"Azog wants you in three hours, alone," Kili gasped. "After that he'll kill my brother. He'll be waiting at the Red Hill, half a mile up the creek from Wrencliffs Drop, the first eastern fork of the river." 

"I know where it is," Thorin muttered, combing his fingers through his nephew's hair, trying to slow his shaking. How had Kili got into this state? How far had he been walking on those broken feet? And the bandage over his eyes – it must be snowblindness, Thorin thought distractedly, even though it was midsummer out there and the door to Erebor was well below the snowline. 

Kili was babbling on. "There's at least twenty-five orcs at my count, ten with longbows, all strong enough to fight under the sun. Eight wargs, I think. And they have a watch at each compass point – the hill is two hundred by one hundred feet, and about fifty high, easier ascent from the west but some foliage to cover you on the east and south – most of them were settled at the east head of the hill – Fili was there too – the creek is just below but they'll sniff you out anyway – I can detail the land around –"

"Kili, slow down, what happened? How did you get away?"

"I didn't," Kili shook his head, and a muffled sob escaped his lips. "He let me go."

Thorin felt a hammer pressed down on his heart. He reached for the bandage again, despite Kili's clutching attempts to stop him. "Let me look," he ordered. Still, he had to fight Kili's weakening grip to pull away the cloth, and oh…

oh.

His wild, little archer, his fierce lad, the second-born that he'd always let run free and far from his uncle's ever-disapproving eye. Always trouble, always determined to break traditions and ruin the best-laid plans that his elders had set for him. And always forgiven, because of his loyalty, because of his smile that none of them could resist. The scout who was always looking ahead, who saw more clearly than any of them the half-imagined hopes and ambitions of his family. The child always looking over his shoulder to make sure his brother was following close behind, or that his uncle had noticed him and his latest mischief. And now, his face, his face, his keen sight...

The noise Thorin heard in his own throat was a low whimper, driven out of him as if someone had slid a knife into his gut. "Kili," he whispered, unable to find any other word on his tongue, shoulders shaking as Kili tugged the bandage down again.

"He caught me. Lured me in. It was my fault," Kili whispered, hunching into himself. "He blunted a knife and heated it in the fire and took my eyes..." he swallowed. "He ate the first one. Don't know what he did with the other."

Thorin gripped the back of his neck and pressed his face into his nephew's hair, hiding from the others as he fought back a roar of grief and rage. Kili murmured in his ear. "Don't go alone, Thorin. It's a trick. He'll kill you and Fili both, he'll never keep his word," he sucked in a breath, curling up in Thorin's arms. "He'll kill you."

Thorin looked up at the circle of dwarves around him. His thoughts were beginning to focus at last. They had very little time. He blinked at Balin. "Get me a strong pony and my lightest armour. No helm."

A plan was beginning to grow. As if summoned by Thorin's own thoughts, a tall, green-clad figure came pushing through the crowd. Thorin saw the exact moment that Tauriel realised who was cradled in his arms, saw her dour, haughty face break into a look of shock and fear. Heedless of the space the others were giving their king, she pushed through and fell to her knees beside him. "Kili!"

"Leave him.” Thorin grabbed her wrist with a snarl. "If you love him, help me save his brother. Ride back to Dale as fast as you can. Find your king. Tell Thranduil our armistice is ended."

"What?" Tauriel stared at him, several paces behind on information. "You want to start the fighting again?"

"No. I am withdrawing all grievances against him. Tell him I will grant him anything he likes, jewels, land, a truce of any terms he chooses, anything, if he gives me a squad of his best archers and another of armed scouts and meets me at Wrencliffs Drop in two hours," Thorin held her gaze. "Tell him I mean it, Tauriel. Anything he wants."

As she nodded and fled, Thorin motioned for Ori and two of the Iron Hills dwarves to come forward take his nephew. He stood up slowly, and then grabbed Balin's shoulder before the old dwarf could leave. "Wait – make it two ponies, and my spare scalemail tunic as well. Find Dis. Get my sister. I need her with me."

"You can't take her into battle with Azog!" Balin hissed. "Thorin, she's not a warrior, she's your accountant!"

"I need her," Thorin repeated through gritted teeth. 

"She should stay here with her son, for Mahal's sake, Thorin."

"Do as I say," Thorin barked. "Mahal cannot help us now!"

 

\---

 

The sun was dead above them in the sky as Dis and Thorin rode towards the Red Hill. The hill was really a massive, solid stone bulging out of the flat plains, made of the same grey granite as the rest of the bedrock in these parts. The origin of the 'Red' in its name was lost to the short memories of the men who named it, but today it seemed as foreboding a sign as they could get. 

They could see the smoke of campfires even when the hill was only a dimple on the horizon. As they grew closer, Thorin could smell cooked flesh and hoped, selfishly, that it was only poor Ginnar and Jor. They had been two first cousins from the Iron Hills, one married to Dain's niece, both brave fellows who'd fought together in the battle of the five armies. They'd taken a shine to Thorin's nephews almost as soon as they'd been introduced, and become Fili's closest friends in the last two years while his brother was off gallivanting around with the elf-woman. Thorin had not had time to tell Dain the bad news about Ginnar before he'd left. He hadn't wanted Dain involved in this situation. If none of them returned from the Red Hill, at least his cousin could take over Erebor until... until Kili was ready for such a task. If he did not succumb to his injuries. Thorin gripped the reigns of his pony until his knuckles ached against his stretched skin.

Dis had spoken little since they'd left the mountain. Balin had not had time to explain to her everything he'd seen and heard in the front hall. At the beginning of the ride she had asked Thorin how badly Kili was injured, but accepted his reticence when he simply said, "He won't be the same anymore, Sister." 

The borrowed scalemail sat tight across his sister’s chest, but her shoulders were straight and her head raised high. As they rode she'd managed to tie her hair into a long, practical braid that ran along the centre of her scalp and down her back. Someone had even found her an axe, though she hadn't raised a blade even to spar since their brother had died all those years ago. 

She was, Thorin knew, terrified. Balin had been fair to want to protect her; unlike her mother and grandmother, Dis had never been a warrior, though Thorin considered her a brutal politician when she wanted things done right. There had been so many soldiers in her family that she'd always said one more would just get in the way. But no trace of her fear showed on her face now, even after Thorin had explained his plan, and her part in it.

"Are you sure you know Azog that well?" she had asked, and he'd nodded.

"The only thing that will make him hesitate is fresh meat, Dis," Thorin had swallowed. "Otherwise he'll kill Fili and I as soon as I'm within arrow-range. But you, another grandchild of Thror he's never got his claws into… that will get his attention. He'll take risks, and that will give us room to move. I hope."

"So I'm a lure on a fishhook," Dis rumbled.

"And I'm the fishhook," Thorin pointed out.

They were spotted just as they got close enough to see the figures of dark-armoured orcs crawling through the heat-haze on top of the hill. There were distant hollers and the clapping of many hands, as if a band of musicians had just walked on stage – or victims into an arena. Thorin paused and then led his sister in closer, keeping the ponies at a slow, steady trot. He resisted the urge to look side to side for Thranduil's scouts in the long grass. He must not give the game away.

They were almost at the foot of the hill when Thorin saw Azog at last. The pale orc strode up onto a rise of rock, arms open. Thorin could see the grin on his face. And behind him – Thorin jerked his pony to a stop as his blood began to pound in his ears – an orc was shoving forward a small, staggering figure to kneel at Azog's feet. Fili's arms were bound behind his back and a gag stuffed in his mouth. Like Kili, the orcs had stripped him of all but his trousers and shirt, though they had left him his boots at least. They had roughly shorn his golden hair, left his scalp bloody and his face bruised. But beyond that he looked intact. His back was straight, his gaze lucid as he met Thorin's eyes and slowly shook his head. Thorin ignored his silent plea. 

Dis had ridden up beside him, and he heard her gasp. She put her hand to her mouth to hide the sound. Thorin couldn't look at her directly. He felt too responsible. None of this would be happening if not for him; he had cut off Azog's hand, he had killed Bolg on Ravenhill, he had beaten back the orc over and over again and yet always failed to kill him. Azog's terrible desire for retribution was the inevitable consequence of that failure. Thorin almost sympathised – until he thought of Kili's face, and the sympathy was quickly overrun by rage.

Azog roared something down at them, and the orc by his side translated.

"He told you to come alone, Oakenshield. You affront this parlay before it has even begun."

Thorin opened his mouth to reply, but Dis got there first. She stood up in her strirrups, thumping her fist on her chest and then pointing straight at the orc chieftain. "I would not be left behind! Tell your master this: I am Dis, daughter of Thrain, mother of that child you have stolen – and mother of the one you sent back to me wrecked beyond repair! It is my right to be here as much as it is Thorin's!"

There was a ripple of whispers across the listening orcs. Thorin wasn't even sure if she was acting to his instructions or really taking charge of the negotiation. Azog must have picked up some of the words, or perhaps had simply guessed her identity already, for he leaned forward with wide-eyes before his lieutenant had finish interpreting. 

Dis let her words sink in before she continued, raising her hands half-clenched towards the hill. "My brother does not rule me, and neither do you, yet I come to you in supplication. Orcs and dwarves alike must have compassion for a mother. My brother may give himself to you if he wishes, but I beg you, release my son alive," she roared. "Honour your promise to trade one life for another, or I swear, you will never see the end of my revenge until the day you die."

Silence followed, but for the low whisper of the interpreter. Thorin broke it, "What is your answer, Azog?" he swung his leg over his pony and jumped down onto the grass, handing the reigns to Dis. Azog had muttered something to those around him. Thorin could see archers readying their bows behind the front ranks of Azog's soldiers, and three or four warg-riders on either side creeping down the curve of the hill through the foliage, where they could race to cut off a fleeing pony. He raised his hand to the neck of Dis' mount. "Back up," he hissed. "Go back, go back. If they start shooting, use the ponies for cover and run for home."

He was sure that Azog wouldn't try to kill either of them until he had Dis in his clutches as well, and thankfully, Dis understood and obeyed at once. She turned the ponies and trotted back until she was close enough to still see all that was happening but out of the range of all but the most skilled bowman. Thorin thought, with a twist in his gut, that Kili could probably still have hit her if he'd been on the hill with a strong bow. Not anymore. 

Thorin lifted his hands to either side of his body. "There is no more to be said. Release my kin, and I will come up to you of my own free will."

Thorin looked back at Fili at last. He was shaking his head fervently now, his eyes hard and despairing. Thorin wished he could have a chance to speak to him before the end of this nightmare, tell him he was blameless and worth any cost, but one way or another there would be no chance for that. He put his foot on the edge of the grey stone and began to climb the shallowest slope of the hill, keeping his eyes on Azog. Closer, closer... he was a hundred feet from them now, hoping against hope that the grasses and creekbeds below were full of lithe scouts in the clever, colour-matched garbs of Mirkwood's best, closing in on the hill just as Azog's wargs snuck through the shrubs to ready their chase. Nobody could really have expected anything less than trickery in a negotiation like this, and surely Azog knew it...

Thorin stopped only fifty feet from the orc chieftain, close enough to see the blue in Fili's eyes. When Thorin met his gaze, Fili dropped his head, his shoulders slumping.

"Enough," Thorin bellowed, lowering his hands. "There is nowhere for me to run. Let him go."

Azog's glare flicked over Thorin's shoulder, watching the distant figure of Dis and the two ponies. Thorin could almost see the battle behind those cold eyes, his desire to kill Thorin at once pressing against his need for more time to get his wargs into position. The latter must have won out. With a sneer he stepped down from his perch and clamped his hand on the back of Fili's head, shoving him roughly down and barking an order at his lieutenant, who drew a huge, wide-bladed knife from his belt. Thorin surged forward, but before he could speak the lieutenant had grabbed the ropes that bound his hands and cut through them with a few ragged slices. He straightened up as Fili rolled onto his back, ripped the gag out of his mouth and raised his head.

"Thorin, run! Run! He's—"

Across the stone came a high, agonised howl that lifted the hairs on the back of Thorin's neck. His hand went to his sword before he'd thought about it, but all eyes had turned not towards him but away down to the riverbank where a staggering warg had fallen half across its rider, baying in pain. Its front leg hung at a hideous, half-severed angle as a tall figure in a pale, brown cloak rose from the cover of the grass with a bloodied sword in its hand. 

Without a moment's further warning, the elves attacked, archers leaping to their feet in every direction and straining their bows to fire on anyone on the hill who hadn't dropped to the ground or thrown themselves behind the wizened bushes and trees that clad the rock. To Thorin it looked incredibly half-hearted, an obvious ploy to goad as many orcs as possible down from the hill and onto the blades of the scouts. He'd sworn to Thranduil that the elves could pull back the moment they saw the orcs rallying and they felt themselves in serious danger – all they had to do was keep Azog's forces distracted for as long as possible.

Thorin drew Orcrist and charged towards Azog's retinue, his eyes locked on where Fili still lay unarmed on the bare stone. In a moment there was an orc between him and his nephew, screaming at him and filling his vision, driving him back with blow after blow of its heavy, iron sword. Thorin stumbled, arms aching as he swept the blade aside, but he had been fighting such creatures long before this poor soldier had been born, and he turned its blade and dispatched it in seconds. He kicked its bleeding body aside, gaze searching for a dwarvish face in the melee. There was nothing.

"Fili!" he roared, and caught a flash of a faded, red shirt in the corner of his eye. He looked over to see Azog staggering backwards, his single hand clutching a fat, black-bloodied gash, sliced diagonally between the plates of his armour. Shining, grey curls of intestines slipped between his fingers as he fell to one knee. Fili was stalking towards him with the dripping knife, the same one with which the orcish lieutenant had sliced his bonds, raising it over his head as Azog snarled and let his guts fall out onto the rock so he could reach for the heavy mace he'd dropped at his side.

"Fili, no!"

Thorin bolted forward and wrapped one arm around Fili's torso just as his nephew lunged at the orc chieftain. Fili screamed in frustration as if Thorin had ripped a part of him away, but Thorin dragged him backwards, looking over his shoulder. "We have to run!"

Already he could see the elves pulling back, and Azog was crying out in rage and pain for his soldiers to return to him.

 _"Let me go!"_ Fili wailed, his voice raw and his body struggling like a snake against Thorin's hold, kicking backwards at his uncle's shins. _"He killed my brother!"_

"No," Thorin gripped him tighter around the waist, turning back towards him to make sure he heard every word. "Your brother is alive."

For a heartbeat, Fili arched his back with such strain that Thorin almost lost his hold, and then he fell slack into the loop of his uncle’s arm. Thorin twisted around towards the west slope of the hill, down towards safety.

Above him rose the figure of Azog's lieutenant, clutching a bruised head with one hand and a huge sword in the other. He came at them from Thorin's left, where Thorin was clutching his nephew close. Thorin couldn't turn fast enough, knowing he couldn't raise his sword in time to block the strike, and on the edge of awareness he heard hoofbeats and a scream of rage—

 

\---

 

Kili lay in the dark and waited for news. 

The infirmary smelled of wood-smoke from a hissing grate somewhere behind him. He couldn't sleep, curled on his side in a lumpy sick-bed with bandages swaddling him, so thick that he could barely move most of his joints whenever his limbs started to get pins and needles. They covered his torso, his feet, his hands and knees and of course, most of his face, a few layers even wrapped over his ears to keep the bandages in place. He felt feverishly hot with the thick, woolen blanket pulled up to his neck, but it took him almost half an hour to find the strength to push it down, and as soon as it was gone he began to shiver and break out in goosepimples. After that, without warning, footsteps came out of the dark and the blanket was tugged it up again. Kili froze in place, convinced for a moment that he was back in the orc camp. Whoever it was left without speaking, perhaps thinking he was asleep, perhaps assuming that he was too invalid to understand. 

Now he felt like he was back in the spiderwebs in Mirkwood, blinded and wrapped up in white cloth, drugged into submission. It was a nightmare, but still, something of an improvement on how he’d started the day. 

Oin had given him poppy-tincture to drink, sweetened with honey that couldn't disguise the intense bitterness of the drug. Kili had been barely conscious by the time they got him down here to the infirmary. Ori had to hold his head and wipe the dribbles from his chin. While Oin cleaned his wounds and coated them in a stinging cream that smelled worse than the tincture tasted, Ori chattered to Kili about what a dreadful mess he looked. Thank Mahal he'd had the decency to keep talking. Friendly voices were the strongest balm against the pain right now. The tincture had helped a little too, but not enough for him to sleep, nor to forget what he was waiting for. 

Dwalin had come in while they thought he was dozing, to tell Oin that Kili’s mother couldn't come down to help. Dwalin was furious to have been left behind without a word of consultation from his king. "As if I don't know that filthy orc as well as anyone! Thorin’s a bloody idiot, facing him alone!" He was doubly furious that Dis had been carried into the danger as well. He and Oin muttered about it in the corner of the room for a while, until Kili tried to push some of the bandages off his ears to hear better and they realised he was awake. 

Dwalin had left without speaking to him. Oin came over to check that the wounds on his back weren't bleeding through.

"He doesn't want to look at me, does it?" Kili asked.

"What's that, lad?" Oin was just a voice floating above his head, and the detached touch of two hands on his shoulder and back.

“Dwalin. He didn’t look at my bed, did he? Didn’t want to know how bad it is.”

Oin was silent for a moment, and then, “It might be hard to believe after all you’ve been through, lad, but he’s seen far worse. I can promise you that.”

“Oh. So it's that he knows how bad it’ll be, then,” Kili mumbled. He wanted to ask whether there had been any news yet, whether anyone had come back from Red Hill, but he knew it was far too early. “I was fighting so hard to survive I didn’t think about what that was going to mean.”

Maybe he was speaking too quietly for Oin to hear everything he’d said, or maybe Oin just didn't want to lie to him. After a moment the old dwarf squeezed his shoulder, “I’ll go see if Balin is around. He can keep you company until you fall asleep.”

His footsteps tottered off, but either Balin was too busy, or Oin hadn’t been able to find him at all, because no one came in for a long time. Maybe Balin had been the one who pulled the blanket up. Kili didn’t know. He was going to have to get used to asking obvious questions.

The hours were slow, almost as slow as the ones he'd walked through. His wounds begin to trouble him afresh as the tincture wore off. Every noise from outside made him come awake, listening for voices, desperately hoping for Thorin's low rumble or Tauriel's elvish lilt. Anyone who had news. Not knowing, unable to do anything to help his family, was as unbearable as his bodily pains. And his mother had gone too… he could not even imagine a world without his mother. But he had little else to think about in the quiet cocoon of the sickbay.

Kili didn't know how much time had passed when he heard heavy footsteps in the corridor and then the creak of the door. He lay still, straining to listen through the bandages around his head as someone in boots stepped in low, scraping steps across the room. They sounded as if they were walking heavily, trying to hide their approach. Suddenly, his head spinning, Kili realised it must be Azog. He'd killed Thorin and got into the mountain somehow. He knew Kili had survived and he'd come to finish him off. Mahal, help him, he had no way to defend himself, he could not even make a fist with these thick bandages. His heart skittering as fast as a rabbit’s, Kili reminded himself that there were twenty stone walls and scores of dwarves between him and the outside world. The visitor was probably Oin. With a surge of rage, he decided he could not stand people creeping around him a moment longer. He raised his head with a bark.

"Who's there?"

"It's me! It's just me."

Like a burst of pure sunlight came his brother's voice from right beside the bed, clear and unmistakable. Fingers seized his arm above the bandages, a calloused thumb rubbing a circle around his wristbone. All the strength left Kili and he fell back against the pillow. His breath was coming in short pants as if he’d run up the mountain all at once. 

“I can’t believe you,” Fili’s voice was breaking on every word. He had knelt down beside the bed until their faces were almost level. “I felt you die after he took you away. I _felt_ it, brother.”

Kili reached out with his free hand and swung his arm around until he found his brother’s shoulders. He rolled onto his stomach, tugging Fili into a loose headlock, and Fili let him without a struggle, even though his face must be squashed half into Kili’s armpit. 

His muffled voice continued to babble, “…and Thorin says you walked right up to the door of Erebor like you’d nothing more than lost your boots and spent the night drunk in a bush. It’s impossible, you’re impossible…”

Kili let out a long, low grumble as if Fili had just revealed some inane joke to him. His muscles were shaking and he couldn’t make his throat unclog long enough to breathe. The last two horrifying days, the impotent terror of waiting, the black future that stretched out before him, they were all banished from the room as easily as the nightmares upon waking. Why had he worried? Why had he ever worried? Everything was fine, now.

“They cut your hair,” was the first thing Kili managed to say, hiccoughing to a stop at the end when he heard what a croaky whine his voice sounded like. He squeezed his arm tighter around Fili’s neck and pressed his nose to the butchered stubble, smelling thickly of blood and sweat, that had once been a head of golden hair. 

“At least you don’t have to see me like this,” Fili’s voice was slightly muffled against his chest, and Kili gave a shuddering laughed. But suddenly sharp fingers were digging into Kili’s shoulders, and Fili pulled his head away from his brother’s grip with a gasp even as Kili tried to hold tighter. “Mahal, what am I playing at – what do you care about my hair when you – when you’ll never—”

Kili’s heartbeat was returning to normal at last. He withdrew his arm slowly, turning his face down into the mattress. His hand curled beside his head of its own accord, as if to shield himself from the morning light in his bedroom back in Ered Luin, when Mama would come in and rip the curtains open to kick her sleepy son out of bed. One of Fili’s hands was still clamped around his shoulder, as if to anchor them together against the worst storms to come. 

Kili mumbled into the mattress.

Fili sniffed, sounding like he was wiping his nose, “What’s that?” 

He pushed his head up a little to speak clearly, “I said, I hate that he was the last thing I saw. I wish I’d looked at you instead.”

Fili bent over him and rested his forehead on Kili's shoulder. Kili felt hot tears dripping onto his skin as Fili bit back a sob and cleared his throat. He took Kili’s hand, gently unpinning Oin’s careful bandages and unwinding the criss-crossed cloth until Kili felt the cool air mixing with the puffs of his brother’s breath on his fingertips. Fili cupped the back of his hand and laid the fingertips on the line of his own chin. Kili could feel the corner of a shaky smile, and the curled fuzz of the long-envied beard. As his hand drifted across his brother’s face he could feel the hot swell of a bruise on Fili’s cheek, and the familiar, broad hill of Fili’s nose. Every line and feature came back to him; he saw Fili’s face again in the streaks and shapes of touch. 

“We’re dwarves,” Fili rasped, propping his elbow on the bed beside him. “We’ve never trusted our eyes, anyway. We see things better once we’ve held the weight of them, felt their give and their resistance.”

Kili swallowed and nodded, letting his hand fall back onto the bed beside his brother’s. Fili took it and tied the loosened bandage off again, but he left the fingertips free, despite their scrapes and broken nails. 

“Mama and Tauriel want to come see you,” Fili said. “I went ahead to check if you were resting.”

“They’re all well?”

“Yes, and Thorin too. Mama saved us both. She rode up the hill on a pony and cut off an orc’s head. You wouldn’t have believed it if you’d—” he squeezed Kili’s hand. “—seen it. I’ll go get them—”

“Wait,” Kili grabbed for his hand, but it had slipped away, and suddenly he was fumbling in the dark again, with no river to guide him, no sun to tell the time, just cold stone and a smoky fire and pain. Again. 

The weight of Fili’s hand reappeared and drove the memories away. “What is it?”

“I do want to sleep after all.” And he did. He really thought this time he could sleep at last, after three days and two nights of endless vigilance and fear. At last there was nothing more to be done but sleep. “I don’t think I can go through all the pity again, Fili, I really can’t. Can you ask them to wait a bit until I’m out, before they come in and sob over me? I don’t want to hear Mama crying. Tell her she can stay outside if she’s going to start that.”

“Alright,” said Fili. “But I doubt she’ll listen to me.”

“Tauriel can come, though. She won’t cry.”

“She will,” Fili said. 

“She won’t.”

Fili squeezed his fingers. “I bet you the filigree broach Thorin gave me for his coronation that she does.”

Kili rolled over onto his side, his back facing the door. “I’ll take that bet. And I’ll ask Mama in the morning whether I won, so don’t bother cheating.”

“I wouldn’t,” Fili promised, his hand lingering on Kili’s shoulder as he stood up, and Kili wished he could say, _no, I want you to, I want you to cheat me and play tricks like you always do, and I want nothing to change between us, I want to go back to the way things were before_ , but he already knew from the thread of delicacy in Fili’s voice that it was too late.


	3. the quiet

They took Kili back to his own rooms once Oin was sure the worst risk of infection had passed, and he didn’t leave them for weeks. The journey home had eaten him up. It was as if he’d aged three centuries instead of three days: even walking around his bed took all the strength he had, and more concentration than he could muster. Then there was the frustration of misjudging distances or tripping over carpets and table-legs during the process, or the wracking pain that frequently kept him senseless. It just wasn’t worth getting out of bed. He could not even go to the entombment of Ginnar and Jor’s remains, what little had been found in the empty orcish camp after Azog’s soldiers had fled. He wanted to speak to Ginnar’s widow, swear his life to her for failing to protect her husband, but he could barely stand up long enough to relieve himself. He heard later that she’d returned to live her mother, Dain’s sister in the Iron Hills. 

At first he had no shortage of visitors, but in the beginning he was too tired to receive them most days and by the end they’d slowed to a trickle and it was just his family left. Fili brought his breakfast in the morning, helped him dress, brushed his hair and wrapped a band of cloth across his nearly-healed face, plaiting the tails into his hair. Fili said he didn’t need to cover his scars, that they were proud war-wounds. And if it bothered Kili, Thorin was already talking to artisans in the Iron Hills who made glass eyes which no one could tell from the real thing. But Kili didn’t want glass eyes and he didn’t want anyone to see the empty scars either, he just wanted to keep hidden. 

Mama did the night shift, when Kili’s mood tended to be worst. She brought him his dinner, helping him find and guide the food to his mouth with a knife and fork in the beginning. She laid out what he needed to bathe and hauled him up and down when he was still to weak to climb in and out of the tub alone. She sung to him when he was too melancholy to talk. Often she stayed up waiting for him to fall asleep, rubbing his neck and shoulders when the pain grew too much, and watching for nightmares. She begrudged him nothing; she had been carrying him and feeding him since his life began, she said, and she would continue until the day one of them died. 

But Erebor still needed running, so Fili and Mama were busy for most of the day. Ori, no doubt under instructions from Thorin or Mama, came by almost every lunchtime to read to him. He was a helpful presence. His grandmother had raised him when his mother was travelling to keep the family fed, and the old woman had been blind from cataracts yet managed a whole household without trouble. It was Ori who told the others to arrange Kili’s food on his plates into easily-describable compass-points, and Ori who took tiny buttons in a great variety of shapes and stitched them into the inside hems of Kili’s clothes, so that he could tell colours and patterns apart by himself. It was Ori, too, who thought to bring Kili a fiddle – he and Fili had both played, back in Ered Luin – so that he would at least have something to occupy himself when he had no visitors. Kili adjusted quickly to playing blind, but playing alone was more difficult. 

Tauriel stayed with him as well, though more erratically; she was in and out of the mountain, with the new treaty and trade between Erebor and Mirkwood. Kili never found out what Thorin had paid for Thranduil’s aid at Red Hill, but it sounded as if the alliance was holding steady for now. Fili had won the bet for the coronation broach: Mama reported that Tauriel had indeed cried over Kili while he slept, though she stayed silent and statuesque even in grief. Kili teased her about it and she pushed him half-over in the bed, laughing that he must absolutely not tell Legolas or her reputation as a warrior would be ruined. She kept him warm some nights too, though nothing more; he knew she wanted more, but he was too exhausted for it. When the candles were blown out and Tauriel was wrapped close around him, he could almost pretend, almost, that he would not miss the red of her hair in the sunlight. 

Tauriel also brought news of how the story of his impossible journey had travelled right through Dale and Esgaroth and was even being passed between the younger elves in Mirkwood. They had each collected their own assortment of rumours about the blind, barefoot dwarf who escaped Azog the Defiler and walked twenty miles (sometimes it was fifty) through forests of thorn bushes and raging rivers (there was general agreement that Kili had swam part of the way) to warn the King Under the Mountain that a great army of orcs had kidnapped the crown prince and was carrying him off as a slave (so the story went). _“Only a dwarf,”_ they said. _“Only a dwarf could manage such a journey.”_

Tauriel disagreed: “I think only you could do it,” she told Kili, her thin fingers running through his hair. “You’re the most remarkable creature I’ve ever met.”

But he noticed that she never touched his face. One night, when she’d stayed late until Dis went to bed, he went to undress and took the bandage off first, instead of after they’d already laid down beneath the blankets and smothered the lamps.

As his scars were revealed by the candlelight, he heard her voice trail off halfway through a sentence, heard the faltering of her breath before she caught herself.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I can imagine.”

“It’s my fault if I think badly,” Tauriel whispered, and from her voice he realised with a stab of betrayal that she was actually turned away from him, facing the door.

A hot rage rushed through him. “Have you never seen a cripple before? Do elves grow their arms back when they’re wounded? Or do you banish the imperfect from Mirkwood so you don’t have to look at them?”

“In a way, we do,” Tauriel said, sounding nauseous and Kili thought, _I make her sick to look at._ “Even Lord Thranduil, he lost the sight in one eye to fire but hides it with a glamour. It’s not considered fitting for royalty—” 

She realised what she’d said too late and swallowed her words with a gasp. Kili had always considered her blunders around their differences endearing; but now he balled his fists and snarled. “Get out of my room.”

“Kili, I didn’t mean – it’s despicable of me, I know, I’m trying – ”

“Leave me! Do not come here again!”

She fled on her silent feet, and even closed the door with the softest click. He grabbed for the bed, feeling his way towards the pillows too late before he fell to his knees. He shoved his face into the blankets and screamed.

 

\---

 

In the fifth week he began to leave his room at last. Ori had found him a thin, light cane from somewhere in the mountain, but still he had to go about with his hand wrapped around Fili or Mama’s elbow. He could no longer pretend he was too weak to walk. He had to face the rest of his friends, his people. 

For over a month he had acquainted himself with every inch of his rooms and could navigate easily through them without tripping, nor losing track of where’d he put down his fiddle or his drink. But beyond the border of his chambers was an unknown realm. He had never realised how disorientating were the echoes of the mountain, how dangerous the paths that ran past huge expanses without even a lip of stone, how little he knew the twists and turns of the palace that had been his home for two years. But the unfamiliar, black world was filled with islands of comfort. It was heartening to bump into Dwalin and Gloin not far from his rooms the first time Fili took him out, and there were many others who knew him as they went. Almost every few minutes Kili was forced to stop so that familiar hands could clap him on the shoulder and say how glad they were to see him up and about at last, as if he’d been felled by nothing more than a short fever. Erebor was not an entirely unknown country after all: Kili guessed before they even reached the centre of the rebuilt market hub that Fili was taking him to the bakery, and he knew from the echoes the next day when Mama walked him through the hall of the kings. It was a relief to find it was all still there in the darkness. 

After only a couple of days Fili brought him to a meeting in the council chambers. Kili didn’t miss the whispers as he entered and Fili eased him into a seat close to the king’s, but he ignored them as he relaxed and rested his cane between his knees, listening to his mother’s voice somewhere on the far side of the table. Before he could think of some way to greet her, a large group of bickering dwarves at the door drew the attention of the room. Kili turned his head towards his uncle’s voice as the king arrived. He heard Thorin voice break off a conversation and turn towards him, and then heard him stride to Kili’s seat. Thorin grabbed his outstretched hand and clapped it between his own, and Kili smiled broadly at him.

“I’m glad you’re here, Kili,” Thorin whispered before he turned to welcome the rest of the room.

Fili had brought him for a reason: today’s schedule included a decision about whether or not to continue with the construction of mass tombs for the many dead that had been found in Erebor since its repopulation. All the bodies – often less than whole, sometimes barely scraps – had been carefully laid out in empty halls, with any belongings that had been on or near them. Many of the dwarves returning from the Blue Mountains and the Iron Hills had found relatives there, and taken them for internment in old family tombs, or new ones paid for with the crown’s gold. But after two years, the number of identifications had fallen to almost nothing, and hundreds of bodies were still lying in state. Many were petrified by the dry air, but a good number of the older discoveries were falling to slime or rot, and had to be wrapped in thick, oiled cloth in attempts to keep smell and disease at bay. They needed to be dealt with soon.

Mass tombs had been suggested, and before the ill-fated hunting trip Kili had been tasked with finding a suitable spot in the mountain and drawing up plans for the entire edifice, including a great, stone memorial to stand upon the roof of the necropolis. But in the weeks of his respite, plans had fallen to the wayside, and the rotting of the bodies had grown even worse. Now the council was talking about burning them all as the warriors had been burned after Azanulbizar. The ashes could be laid to rest in a smaller, cheaper memorial, closer to the main street of Erebor. 

“But these dwarves died before burning was considered an honourable end,” Balin countered. “They would be appalled not to be laid to rest in stone. Even worse, many of them died by dragon-fire – how can we subject their bodies to fire again?”

“They are not here to mourn the dead; we are,” Thorin pointed out. “No dwarf these days would think less of them, and a monument in the main street does better to remind us all of our history. I am not sure it should not be hidden away in the depths of the mountain.”

The argument went back and forth for some time, and Kili had trouble keeping track of it all no matter how quickly he turned his head; he still missed words when he couldn’t see the faces and mouths of the speaker, nor could he always tell who they were replying to. Fili leaned in towards him as it went on, whispering names in his ear as each of the councilors got up and said their piece. 

At last, Thorin cleared his throat. “Kili?” he asked. “Your sketches of the necropolis are almost finished, and the council approves of them; do you think it is worth the expense?”

Kili paused, startled to be called upon so suddenly. Fili nudged him to stand and he pushed back his chair, one hand wrapped loosely around his cane once he was on his feet. Unlike Fili, he’d never had much fear of speaking in front of groups when his elders allowed him to. If anything, it was easier when he couldn’t see them all staring. 

“I think we should continue with the old plans,” he said with a shrug, relieved to hear his own voice ring out loud and clear. “With all due respect to my king, I don’t want to pass this monument every day. Not because we shouldn’t remember it, but because it should not be an everyday thing. There are already memorials to skirmishes and battles on the main street; their scale is petty in comparison. This tribute should shock us and humble us every time we face it, every time we go to pay our respects and remember what Smaug did. The scale of the necropolis, the sight of the names of the dead, should not be reduced. For practicality’s sake, rather than build the entire memorial first we can carry out the entombment in a simplified crypt just as quickly as the cremations. Then we can focus on building the planned exterior over about eighteen months. Those are my thoughts, from my experience budgeting the project.” 

He felt that was a fair effort, but almost at once some politician with an Iron Hills accent grumbled, “Well, after what we had to pay Thranduil for one day’s work at the Red Hill, maybe you need to reconsider your budget.”

Kili turned his blank face in the direction of the voice, his blood rushing to his cheeks. “Oh? And would you like _your_ tomb to be a bread-box full of ashes in front of every shop on main street?”

A sudden, cold silence followed his words. Kili felt a tug on his sleeve and sat down with a jolt. Fili hissed in his ear, “Did you know that was Dain?”

Kili turned towards him, mouth falling open, and shook his head quickly. His retort would have been a rude way to speak to any of his elders, but he would never have dared snap at Dain or Thorin like that – not to mention the implications of mentioning the tomb of the Lord of the Iron Hills while he was still alive. He felt his stomach wringing itself into knots in shame. 

“Kili,” Thorin said softly. “I would speak to you outside. The rest of you, carry on, we will be only a moment.”

Kili gripped the side of the table to shove himself out of his chair, pushing Fili down again when he tried to rise as well. His hand was shaking so much that his cane tapped upon the ground as he stretched it out to take a few steps towards Thorin. He lifted his hand and Thorin slid his elbow into his grip and led him out into the hall.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Kili turned to his uncle, scrubbing his hand down his face. “I’m so sorry, Thorin, I didn’t realise who I was speaking to. I will apologise to Dain at once.”

“It’s alright,” Thorin’s hands rested on his shoulders, squeezing until Kili slumped. “I know it was just a mistake. Dain was only teasing you anyway, he’ll already have forgiven you; he’s very fond of you and Fili both,” he paused. “Why don’t I call for someone to take you to the library for the rest of the afternoon?”

“What?” Kili raised his head. “No – Thorin, I won’t speak out of turn again, but I need to stay. This is my work, I deserve to be here!”

“You’re still ill—”

“I’m blind, not an idiot!” Kili cried. “It’s my first day in a crowd, Thorin. I will learn to tell who I’m speaking to. I can learn, Thorin, but you must put me to the test!”

Thorin’s hand slid from his shoulder, and he must have motioned for some retainer from down the hall, because Kili heard footsteps approaching. “No!” Kili grabbed for his uncle’s collar, for a moment forgetting that not everyone else needed touch to connect with those around them. “Don’t push me out, uncle, I haven’t lost anything but my eyes. Please.”

“Kili, you’re not ready,” Thorin pried his fingers off gently, and folded them around his cane. “Have patience.”

 

\---

 

Ori didn’t ask the reason for his foul mood when he arrived in the library. He disappeared for a short while and returned with wine and cheese, catching Kili up with all the week’s gossip while they ate. The air was so thick with dust that Kili could taste it on his fork, and the smell of paper and vellum slipped around him like a fog. 

When he’d run out of fresh news, Ori suggested he read Kili some of the history books he’d been collating, brought in from abandoned homes and halls around the mountain. It wasn’t how Kili wanted to spend his afternoon, but he was in no mood for ruining Ori’s day too, so he curled up in a chair and let Ori settle across from him, listening to his friend prop his boots up on a desk and open a creaking tome in his lap.

“Herein lie my memories of King Oin Firstblood, Son of Gloin, Leader of Durin’s Folk, Lord of the Grey Mountains, and my dearest friend. These are laid down by Vinnar son of Vaka, son of the King’s mother’s brother and retainer to my lord Oin for all my educated life…” 

Ori spoke with an open-mouthed slowness that was not usual of him; he must be translating the work as he went. Kili tipped his head back in the chair and tucked his hands under his arms. He wished he’d brought his fiddle up from his rooms. He listened as best he could to the praise-dripping descriptions of King Oin’s deeds as a young captain, and his ascension to the throne at the ripe old age of a hundred and forty-seven, already married with a son and a daughter.

“…in that autumn, only two years after Oin had become king, we travelled to Rhûn to trade salt for their spices,” read Ori. “The negotiations with the lords there went well, but during our journey home, two of our young servants fell ill with a fever and a red pox upon the face and chest, and within days four more had fallen sick, including the king. We were forced to stop in the Goat Valleys – that’s the old county that used to be west of the Iron Hills, Kili –”

“I know,” Kili muttered. “And I know King Oin doesn’t die. He has a long and peaceful reign full of salt trade. Don’t you have anyone with a more interesting history, Ori?”

“Oin _is_ interesting. You should let me finish,” Ori scolded him. “Anyway: In the Goat Valleys, where a miserable few villages eke out their living from the land like humans. Because of the oncoming winter, there was nothing I could do for my lord but nurse him with warm blankets, cold compresses and goat-stew. The fever set into his head and ravaged him horribly, making him speak nonsense and often writhe in such pain that it was all I could do to hold him in the bed. I allowed no one else into the room so that none would see their lord in such a state, and thankfully I did not show any signs of the pox. On the seventh day the fever broke and he returned to me lucid and able to recall the answers to any question I gave him. However, his limbs were weak and his sight had been stolen from him completely, so that he could barely tell when I pulled open the shutters and shone the bright, afternoon light onto his face. He began to rant and rage when he discovered his plight, for he had a great love of beautiful jewelry and often crafted it with his own hands for his pleasure. He knew the skill of cutting gems, and understanding the light and colour of them, was now lost to him.”

Kili found himself sitting up further in the chair. His hand crept unbidden to his cane and he squeezed it as if for comfort.

“Three of our folk died that week, and at the end of it we carried their bodies back to their kin at Seldalr, while the king rode behind me on my pony…”

Ori read for the rest of the afternoon. He told how many of Oin’s court wanted his younger brother to take the crown, but Oin fought to keep his throne and continued to rule the Longbeards for over a hundred years. He became famous for always charging first into the battle to draw first blood until he heard his soldiers’ war-cries surrounding him, and training his captains to report to him constantly in Khuzdul, as honestly as they could, so that he could judge a situation without ever seeing it or the enemy overhearing. He had two more children and died popular and prosperous, although of course, that was only Vinnar son of Vaka’s account of the matter.

Kili sat silently for a long time once Ori trailed off. 

“I think I should go back to my room,” he said quietly. “Mama is probably looking for me.”

Ori stammered, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have thrown that on you without warning. I just found it the other day, and I was so excited to read it to you.”

“No… thank you,” Kili sat up in the chair and eased himself back to his feet. His limbs had gone mostly to sleep. He fumbled for his cane. “I appreciate it, Ori. If you… if you find that sort of thing again, I’d like to know.”

There wasn’t any need for Ori to lead him back upstairs; Fili arrived before they’d finished clearing up their lunch from hours earlier. He was furious with Thorin for sending Kili out of the meeting and triply furious with himself for not challenging Thorin at the time. The necropolis plans had been officially abandoned after Kili left; the Erebor dead would be cremated. The monument where they rested would be based on parts of Kili’s drawings for the original memorial.

“They did like your designs, Kili,” he insisted as they walked back. “Everyone agreed, it was a very progressive piece of architecture.”

“It’s alright,” said Kili. “I don’t think I’m going to be making a career of it now.”

But then again, they’d also said King Oin would never go to battle again. 

 

\---

 

That winter, Kili began to shoot blind. 

It was Ori’s idea; he had been in Dale and seen a blind girl playing catch with her fruit-seller father, hurling a ball from one side of the street to the other, and each time her father was catching it in a pot, which he was tapping with a wooden spoon. Although there was no doubt that sometimes he had to reach to get the ball, he was walking up and down the sidewalk and the girl’s aim was following him closely. Ori came back the next day and told Kili all about it.

“But what’s the point?” Kili asked glumly. “Deer won’t rattle pots when I go hunting. Orcs won’t clap their hands first before they attack us on the road. I’m never going to be able to shoot pinecones from the tops of trees again, Ori, or birds in flight for our dinner.”

“Well if you’d rather sit around and listen to me read history all day, you’re welcome,” replied Ori. “But I’m starting to lose my voice.”

They began in some of the lower halls, thin corridors where there was no one who could walk in on them unexpectedly. They took a wooden target, which Ori could tap with a stick before stepping behind a column while Kili fired. It was only a thirty-foot range but it felt like it might as well be a mile. For the first day he hit nothing but the stone yards away from his goal, and he went to bed disheartened and snappy, so much that his mother kept asking him whether she had to go and smack his uncle for putting him in such a foul mood. 

“It’s not Thorin,” Kili assured her hastily. “I’m just feeling the loss today, Mama.”

He had begun sitting in on council meetings again, listening hard and saying little. He also joined Fili’s work around the mountain most days, helping out however he could. But he needed something for himself besides the fiddle. Something to prove to himself he was doing better than yesterday.

By the end of the second day with Ori and the archery target, he was hitting the wood more than once out of every three shots. Each time, Ori called the inches and compass direction by which he’d missed the centre. All of a sudden, after about the fourth or fifth time he heard the thwack of the arrowhead biting into the target, a thrill ran through Kili. He remembered being a child in the Blue Mountains. A head short of his full height he had struggled to learn with an old, stiff bow that was the best Mama could afford. Thorin had learned to shoot somewhere during his youth, travelling across the world after Erebor had burned, and he went out with Kili whenever there was time in the summer evenings. With endless patience he taught Kili not just to stand in place and fire at a painted circle but to run and shoot and keep running, to hit a moving target no larger than his palm, and to fire from the back of a galloping pony. It was difficult, exhausting work for a young dwarf, but it was one of the only times Thorin spent with Kili alone. That rather than the weapon was the attraction in the beginning. And then after a while, the love of the craft took over and nothing could stop his momentum. 

As he stretched the string back, the ripples of the target rolling through his ears, Kili felt that old love of learning rise up like a forest fire. He knew the wood was there, he knew the circle was inside it, sight or no-sight. It existed, and the arrow existed, and he just had to bring them together.

Breathe; release. He heard steel strike wood. 

Ori cried and clapped his hands, “Oh, I’d say nine inches south-west that time! Well done!” and Kili roared; he cheered his success until the caverns echoed with his wordless voice and Ori’s growing laughter.

“What are you so pleased about?” Fili asked the next morning. “You’re smiling like you’re at the bottom of a Dorwinian bottle.”

“It’s a fine morning, is all,” Kili replied. He wasn’t ready, yet, to show Fili or Thorin what he’d managed. He wanted to get stronger first. He wanted them to take him seriously.

 

\---

 

In the first warm days of spring, Kili and Ori took a trip outside to try shooting under different conditions, full of wind and the rustle of trees, and without the echoes of tunnels. It was the first time Kili had left the mountain since that day kneeling on the gravel, too weak to stand, his arm reaching for Nori’s voice in the distance. He thought of clambering over rocky, overgrown paths around the foothills and his lungs deflated and his heart felt clamped inside his chest. But Ori would be with him. He couldn’t get lost. It would be a leisurely day in the sunshine with nothing to worry about.

Ori had a surprise waiting for him in the front hall. As they approached the gate, he brought Kili to a stop and bent slightly. Kili realised he was bowing. “Morning, ma’am. I’m glad you could join us.”

“Hello, Ori. Hello, Kili,” said Tauriel’s voice. She sounded stiffly nasal. That usually meant she was nervous.

Kili’s grip bit down on Ori’s elbow. “Tauriel… hello. Are you walking with us a little way?”

“Ori invited me for the whole way,” Tauriel said softly. Kili heard her swallow. “But I don’t want to ruin your day out—”

“I should have told you,” Ori turned to Kili. “I’m sorry. I was actually a bit worried, you know, because really, if something were to go wrong, Kili, I’m not that much good in a crisis, and Fili said we should take someone—”

“Fili said _what_?” Kili gaped. “What, he thinks I need a nanny, does he? Ori, you fought goblins and spiders and orcs with the rest of us, you’re perfectly fine in a crisis!” he shook his head. “And why Tauriel?”

“Well, that wasn’t Fili’s idea,” Ori said, a little snobbily. “That was mine.”

Kili folded his arms and twitched his face towards where Tauriel stood. “Yes? Think of it yourself, did you?”

Tauriel cleared her throat. “Kili, I wanted to talk to you before now, but your mother has not allowed me.”

“Good on her. I threw you out,” Kili said.

Ori elbowed him. “So Fili can’t give you a chaperone when you want to go wandering around, but your mother can tell you who your friends are? Do you want to be babied or not?”

“Kili,” Tauriel had stepped in closer. “I’ll stay behind if you wish, and not bother you or your brother again. But I will not leave your uncle’s service. I will not return to the forest while you are here in the mountain. I still believe there is hope for me here. That my heart is still here.”

For several long moments Kili neither moved nor spoke, because Mahal, he wished he could see her face and know her mood as he once had; but if he could have no clue as to her demeanor, then he refused to give her any sign in return. In his gut, he felt a twist of discomfort. He could remember exactly what she’d said that night he told her to leave, the lilt of her voice, the short breath of panic and regret. The scene was veined with poison, but looking back at it now he saw that the poison had come mostly from his own painful recovery, his impatience, his fear. He weighed the memory against the Tauriel he’d known when he could still see her, the one who’d abandoned her home and lord to save a dwarf she barely knew. The one who sung to deer in her mother tongue as she ended their lives. The one who was so afraid of speaking in front of crowds of strangers that she sometimes walked back and forth ten or twelve times while Kili watched with his hand over his mouth cover his smile. The one who didn’t believe volcanos were real, but explained at length how they had all been dragons and balrogs that foolish dwarves had mistaken for natural disasters. The one who grew so impatient with Kili in the mornings she would lay kisses up and down the length of him while he pretended to sleep in the hope that she let him lie in longer. 

He missed her so much.

“You can come,” he said quietly, with a shrug. “For safety.”

They all took turns carrying the picnic basket Ori has prepared, which smelled of fresh bread and rolls of cured meat. There was a bottle of water and one of wine as well, light stuff that between three wouldn’t make them too rowdy. Ori went ahead and narrated the journey before Kili could reach it; “Five steps up here. Big rock on your left.” 

Despite his cane, Kili was troubled by how much harder it was to navigate the wending track, overreached by grasses and punctuated by sudden drops, than the flat lanes of Erebor. His presence forced them to walk as slow as flowing honey, but it was better than falling on his face. He was out of shape as well, after weeks of bedrest and easy walks around the mountain. And the basket weighed him off-balance, though he refused to relinquish it until Tauriel said quietly, “It must be my turn to carry that thing. Pass it back.”

They went further down the valley where Smaug’s desolation hadn’t destroyed as much and sat in the sunshine just on the edge of the treeline. Tauriel had barely spoken twenty words since they’d left the gate, but with her constant presence Ori was less forthcoming with gossip and historical ramblings than usual. In a wide meadow he threw stones for Kili to try and hit whatever tree he knocked, but even with barely a breeze Kili did not have much luck and it was a slow job for Ori to retrieve the arrows from the undergrowth each time. Pretty soon they’d lost two and Ori was rummaging about looking for a third escapee when Tauriel, sitting somewhere to Kili’s left, said, “Shall we have some lunch and try again later?”

“I was getting it yesterday,” Kili complained, kicking at the thistles around his feet. He hated thistles. “I have to adjust to everything new, is all.”

“You’ll get there,” Tauriel said softly, and Kili wanted to rub his face against her voice. He felt angry at his own body, for loving her so much when she found him so disgusting. “You can do anything, Kili.”

It would be a demeaning affirmation from Fili or Thorin, something to be told to children frustrated by their first lessons, yet Kili knew – because Tauriel was bad at lying, and because he knew _her_ – that she really believed it. He wondered, not for the first time, whether she just didn’t understand mortals at all, and thought they were magical creatures like Ents who could make wishes come true or some nonsense, and whether that made it a bit odd that she wanted to sleep with one of them. But then, she didn’t say those kinds of things to most mortals (that he’d heard). Just him. 

They ate all the food and drank all the wine and the water. Kili polished off everything Ori handed him, if for no other reason than to make sure the basket would be as light as possible on the way back. He’d noticed the sun on his skin was cooling by the end of the lunch and suddenly he felt cold taps on the back of his hand.

“Oh, no, on top of everything else!” Ori grumbled. “Where did these rainclouds come from?”

The hiss of water on the leaves rushed up the mouth of the valley until it reached Kili’s ears in a wave. It wasn’t thick, but the droplets were heavy, spring rain that smelled warm on the growing earth around them. Ori had jumped up to close the basket, and Tauriel was on her feet running to fetch his arrows and hide the tips in case they rusted. Kili listened to the rain from where he sat, his knees pulled up to his chest and his hair beginning to drip down his collar. 

And then he raised his head. “Ori, hear that–”

“Eh?” Ori’s footsteps stopped. 

“The bottle,” Kili motioned towards where the wine or the water bottle lay in the grass. “Put it somewhere – somewhere I can shoot it!”

“It’s glass,” Ori said, thinking perhaps of how annoyed Dori would be to find out one of his expensive vessels had been shattered.

“I’ll pay you back. Please! Not too far – leave it in the open.”

Ori came over, lifted the bottle out of the grass and walked away some distance. He must have propped it up on a large rock, by the sound of it. Tauriel pressed the bow into Kili’s hands as Ori hurried back.

“Safe?” Kili asked, to check that nobody was between him and his target as Tauriel handed him an arrow.

“Safe,” Ori confirmed, and Tauriel echoed him, too excited not to join in. 

Kili raised the bow, listening to the raindrops on the glass bottle, listening, nocking the fletching with ease born of years, listening, drawing back, listening, line up, breathe, release.

There was the clatter of a glass bottle falling over and rolling down a rock. Ori hollered while Tauriel whooped and clapped her hands. Kili felt a broad smile spread across his face, and the rain didn’t seem so cold anymore. Tauriel was slapping him on the back. Ori ran over to check and called, “The bottle’s not even broken! I’ll see if I can find the arrow.” As Kili stood with the bow in his hand he felt alive and glorious as any warrior in the library’s books.

Before he thought about it, he turned and caught Tauriel’s fingers, following the line of her wrist and up her arm with his palm. She was standing just down the hill from him so that she was only a little above his height, and he leaned in with his hand resting lightly on the side of her neck, slipping beneath the soft curtain of her rain-damp hair. He felt her sway towards him and they kissed; it was never clear who had moved first. 

Tauriel’s hands moved to his blindfold, and he grabbed her before she could push it off.

“You don’t have to look,” he said.

Her hands slid down to frame his face, the rain sticking their skin together. “I don’t care, Kili,” she said. “Or at least, I don’t want to care, and I have to see you if I’m going to learn how to do that.”

After a moment’s hesitation he pushed the blindfold off and she kissed his cheeks and his mouth until Ori came back up the hill with the successful arrow. He coughed and reminded them that they had to get home before they caught their death of cold.

Tauriel’s hand slipped over Kili’s shoulder as if of its own accord while he readjusted his blindfold. She must have turned her head towards him, because her voice was direct as she said, “I used to carry you home sometimes.”

“Sometimes I was drunk,” he reminded her.

“Not always. Sometimes you just liked not having to walk.”

That was true, and the rain did not look like it was going to stop, so she dropped onto one knee and Kili climbed onto her back. She laced fingers beneath him like a sling and stood up effortlessly. She carried him back to Erebor while Ori hurried behind with the basket over his head to protect himself from the rain, complaining bitterly when the water ran between the wicker strips and down his nose. 

And Kili thought about how he must show Fili and Thorin his shooting as soon as he could. And Mama too, he must show them all. Then they would have no more doubts, and neither would he.


	4. the child

In the summer, Fili and Kili went hunting.

It had been six years since they went out with Ginnar and Jor, six years since Kili walked home barefoot and bleeding. Fili’s hair had grown long and thick as it had ever been, tied into two braids to keep it out of the way for the hunt. And this time there were seven dwarves in the party: three friends and two extra guards whom Thorin insisted on, even when Fili laughed at him and promised they’d be fine. Tauriel had planned to join the hunt as well, but she was feeling poorly this week and had decided at the last minute to stay behind. As they left Fili worried that Thorin would worry, for he trusted Tauriel above all others to protect his kin from harm; but Dis had promised to pinch her brother if he started fretting. 

Kili rode a stocky little pony named Beef. She was a pig-headed but generally unflappable creature. She had been trained as a foal to follow other ponies wherever they walked, so that Kili only needed to take the tail of the group and Beef would carry him as far as they needed to go. She would come when he whistled too, and knew more commands than most of the beasts in Erebor’s stables. He had his bow and arrows hanging from the saddle. It was only for his own comfort. There was no way he could make a kill even if a rabbit or a boar ran squealing right past Beef’s hooves – there was far too much danger that one of his companions would be standing within his range. But he was glad to get out of the mountain and spend some time sleeping under the trees and eating fresh-killed meat skewered right over an open fire. 

Kili wore glass eyes these days rather than the blindfold. They were the finest work of the Iron Hills, as Thorin has promised. He barely felt them most of the time, even when he blinked. But Fili said the brown didn’t quite match what he remembered of his brother’s real eyes.

Over the foothills they travelled and into the young forests north-west of Erebor where the game had crept back into Smaug’s old territory. The first night they saw nothing larger than a rabbit, and spent the evening drinking their first skin of wine, singing old songs and make up new ones. The air grew cool on Kili’s skin. An owl called for its kin from across the valley. One of their friends, Nior, asked Kili what it was like to have an elf so that they could make a song of it; Fili made an unhappy noise, but Kili shrugged and smiled. 

“I’ve got my own songs for her,” he said. “But they’re not for drunk dwarves to sing around campfires.”

Orrost cleared his throat to change the subject. “How about we make another song for Kili?” he said brightly. “About his long walk from Red Hill back to Erebor?”

“No,” said Kili at once.

“I only meant, as a tribute – what greater feat can any dwarf claim since the battle of five armies—”

“ _No_ ,” Kili repeated coldly. “No songs. There is nothing glad that came out of that day.”

After a moment of chastened silence, Fili said, “There was my life, brother. And yours.”

“One thing,” Kili grumbled in accession. “Sing a song about Fili, if you want.”

But eventually they chose an old ballad about Durin the second instead.

The next day the hunting was better. By noon Orrost had bagged them two pheasants, for he was as quick with his bow as Kili had once been. They were tracking boar spoor through thicker woods when Fili said, “Sh, sh, there’s a girl.”

“Your pony smell something?” Kili asked. Beef was calm and slightly bored beneath him, but he strained his ears. The others had gone completely silent too, listening hard.

The only warning they had was a rhythmic crunching and crashing, _doom, doom, doom_ , six or seven times in rapid succession and growing louder. Kili was reminded of rock giants, but his heart began to race at the thought of another hunting trip six years ago. The orcs had been silent then, so this had to be something else. 

Then he heard Nior yell, “ _BEAR!_ ”

In the next instant, the trees to his left broke open with a huge wrenching of branches and a roar like nothing Kili had heard since he’d seen siege trolls outside Dale. He could smell the stink of bear-fur, its breath meaty and rancid, and blood in the air. Beef reared up on her hind legs, screaming in panic, and Kili could do nothing but bend over the saddle and hang on tight, ready to jump free if it felt like the pony was going to fall over on top of him – but jump where? Into the mouth of a bear?

“Kili!” his brother was screaming, hooves barreling closer. “Kili, move!”

Kili tried to protest, but there were so many noises and he was turning his head so fast to try and keep track of them that his lungs locked up and he couldn’t speak. And then Beef made the decision for him, bolting forward into the undergrowth. Branches whipped across Kili’s face and he bent double over the pony’s neck, clinging to a handful of her mane. His teeth was clenched tight as he was jolted hard enough to make them rattle. His thighs ached trying to keep his feet balanced in the bouncing stirrups. The roar of the bear and the sounds of battle were fading rapidly into distance. 

After what felt like hours, Beef slowed to a trot, twitching and tossing her head. Kili sat up in the saddle, wincing at the sting of grazes on his face and aching bruises between his thighs. His heart was still racing, but he tried to gather his thoughts.

He slid off Beef’s saddle very slowly and carefully, ready to grab her bridle if she spooked again. Like a sliver of light being cast across the floor of a black cave, his senses touched the unseen world bit by bit. He shifted around a little, wishing he’d brought his cane, and found that the ground beneath his boots was lumpy, soft and devoid of large shrubs. He could feel the muffled warmth of a clouded sun, but the buzzing of bees wasn’t vast. The whistles of birds, the rustle of leaves and the rich smell of wet undergrowth told him the forest was close. He must be in a small clearing, somewhere Beef had stopped because she could see her surroundings. He couldn’t be sure of anything more than that. 

He gripped Beef’s reigns and hummed to keep her calm. Her neck was damp with sweat and she flinched but didn’t shy from his hand. He tried to take stock of his sitution.

There was nothing to do but wait for help. He had a large water-skin, plenty of meat and journeybread, and a thick blanket. He’d have to sleep holding Beef’s ankle – she was notoriously good at splipping her bridle and going for a wander when she wasn’t watched – but maybe it wouldn’t come to that. The trail that the pony had smashed through forest would be easy to follow. Someone would come for him soon. 

Unless none of them had… no, that was impossible. Six brave, dwarven hunters could survive one raging animal. There had been something wrong with that bear, Kili was sure of that; it had been injured, or perhaps sick, or it had been bitten on its snout or neck by a snake. That made it far more dangerous. But if it had been determined to tear through the bush it would probably have been just as desperate to keep going. 

Just as he was thinking this, Kili became aware that something was watching him.

He paused with his hand on the saddlebags, checking his supplies were still intact. The birds in the forest behind him had gone quiet, and he’d heard the wing-patter of a few of them taking flight. He might have imagined it, but he was even sure there had been the crunch of a gentle foot on fallen strips of bark. 

Maybe it was a large animal. But after all the racket Beef had made in getting them to this place, Kili couldn’t believe that any deer or pig would still be within a mile of here. A wolf, by comparison, might have been curious of his smell but would have been far more silent and not disturbed the birds. And if it was a dwarf or a farmer, why hadn’t he announced himself? 

Kili’s insides began to knot themselves into hard lumps. He remembered Fili screaming his name six years ago, and the noise Jor had made as black-flighted arrows buried themselves in his flesh. He tried to keep his breathing steady. Enemies didn’t come this far south. They just didn’t, not these days. The orcs of the north had been fighting amonst themselves for years now, and had not bothered Erebor once since Azog’s death. 

And he _was_ dead. Fili had gutted him. There was not so much as a rumour of his ugly face, not even from the orcish traders that often passed through the mountain’s markets. 

And yet sometimes Kili still dreamed of that night, and that blunted knife.

Slowly, making as if he was just taking stock of his bags, he unstrapped his bow from the side of his bag and unscrewed the cap of the quiver that hung from his saddle. With the same deliberate calm he turned on the spot with an arrow nocked and aimed at the grass, his fingertips resting on the slack string. 

“Hello, there,” he called, feeling a little stupid at the possibility he was speaking to the empty forest – but he’d much prefer that was true. “Come forward and give me your name. I’m no bandit. I’ve come from Erebor.”

There was no answer, but Kili was sure he made out the faintest pressure of silence ahead of him, almost like a tunnel of quiet where the insects had been flying a moment before. There was another soft crunch of a light foot on the dry grass. That meant his watcher was standing in the meadow right in front of him. They saw that he was blind, then. Yet they still did not give their name. 

But their footsteps had given them away.

Kili flexed his grip around the bow. Its recurve made it far heavier a draw than anything Tauriel and her kin used. Kili had built his strength back over six years, and then some. His arrows at close range could shatter bones and rip through a body like it was straw. _You fear no enemy, seen or unseen,_ he told himself, blinking as he felt a drip of sweat trickle onto the bridge of his nose. _You are a son of Durin._

He heard a movement just on the edge of perceptibility, a sweep like someone raising a sword, and from several feet to the right came the clatter of dry wood, brashly loud. Kili’s bow was up and the string drawn before his thoughts had caught up with the game: his watcher had thrown a stick or some trinket at the nearest tree to draw him off. He fired, heard his arrow bury deep in living wood and drew another from the quiver by his side, nocking and aiming at the place where he had heard the footsteps.

“There we are,” he said. “Do I pass your test? Or do you need another demonstration?”

“Wait, please!”

The voice that emerged from the place at the end of his arrow was small and high-pitched, and the words labourious with a thick accent, as if the speaker was chewing a mouthful of stones. It took Kili a moment to recognise it and his hand tightened around the bow, lips peeling back from his teeth.

“Don’t kill me!” the voice was trembling. “Please, I only have a little knife, I won’t hurt you!”

It was a child. This fact seemed to take longer to sink into Kili’s thoughts, while others crowded it and tried to smother it: _Kill it. Danger. Shoot it. Don’t hesitate. Don’t listen!_

“Please!” the voice said again, lower now as if the child had fallen to his knees. Kili heard pure fear and realised what he was doing. With a gasp he broke out of his own panic. He dropped his aim back to the earth, sucking in a deep breath. 

“What are you doing out here?” he snarled, keeping the arrow tight against the string. “I almost killed you!”

The child could not be alone. There must be others, though he was sure they would have jumped him by now if they had been watching. Kili had to get out of this place. 

There came a sniffle. Kili grumbled. “Where are you folk? Are you lost?”

“Yes,” the child mumbled. “Yes, I don’t know the way. _Kra_ — Mother – knows the way but she…” the child’s voice was growing a little stronger. Kili thought he had got back onto his feet, but stepped no closer to the dwarf. He was at Kili’s head-height. He must be very young indeed. “I heard your pony and I thought you might help me.”

Kili began to relax back onto his heels. A child travelling with his mother. It seemed an implausible story, but the boy had not tried to run or call for anyone. Either he truly was desperate for aid, or he was particularly young and stupid. 

“What do you need?” Kili snapped. “I’m not staying long. My party will be here soon, and you should go before they arrive. They won’t be as friendly as me.”

The child gave a small whimper. “Mother got cut. The bear cut her. It was my fault, I saw the meat and we were so hungry so I went for it, I didn’t know it was the bear’s kill, it was foolish, I’m a fool, and Mother ran and slashed the bear’s face but it cut her before we could get away and I think it’s very bad and there’s so much blood. I don’t know what to do. Please.”

He spoke in a rush, and the self-deprecation in the child’s voice was so familiar that Kili’s gut began to untie itself and his heart began to slow at last. The story would explain things the boy couldn’t know that he knew, like the maddened bear that smelled of fresh blood. How many children could come up with a lie like that all at once, with a stranger pointing an arrow at their face? Perhaps it was true – perhaps the voice was just a lost boy with a wounded guardian.

“Where is she?” Kili asked. “Your mother.”

“At the cliff. Not far,” the boy said.

Kili swallowed. He tucked the arrow between his thumb and the bow, and felt his way along Beef’s flank until he found her reigns. She hadn’t made a run for it, which said a lot about the danger. If she’d smelled a pack of killers hiding in the trees, she’d have bolted again for sure. “Come here.”

He heard the boy approach with slow footsteps. With a sigh, Kili slipped the bow back onto Beef’s saddle and put the arrow away. He reached out his hand and felt in the air until he touched the rough linen of a sleeve and could follow it up to a skinny, damp shoulder. The boy’s shirt was almost falling off him, and he was barely at Kili’s height. Kili motioned for him to turn around and rested his hand on that strange shoulder again. 

“Go on. Lead me. I can’t promise I can help, but I’ll try.”

“Thank you,” the boy said, still a little damply, and began to pick his way across the meader. Kili tugged Beef’s bridle and she followed with a snort. For a few steps there was silence and then the boy asked, “Can you really not see me?”

“I can still find you just fine,” Kili snapped.

“Yes. Yes, but… what’s wrong with your eyes? They look… all clean.” 

Kili paused. After a moment he said, “They aren’t real. I lost my eyes.”

“How do you lose your eyes?” the boy asked. He sounded like wee Gimli when he’d first learned to talk, running around after his older cousins and pointing out everything he saw as if he thought he was the cleverest dwarf in the world for knowing its name.

“A falcon stole them,” Kili snapped. “Keep walking. Where is your mother hurt on her body? What does the wound look like?”

“Her back,” said the boy. “The bear pulled open her back, scratched her arm. It’s big and deep.”

Perhaps only a couple of blows, then, and the blood-loss might look worse to a child than it would to someone who’d seen battle. Kili couldn’t help picturing his own mother. He imagined her standing between a roaring bear and a small, dark-haired dwarf-child with only a knife to defend herself, imagined her dress ripped open across the back as she tried to flee with the child under her arm. He hoped to any god who was listening that he wasn’t falling into the world’s most obvious trap.

“What’s your name?” Kili asked, and when the boy didn’t answer at once he said, “I’m… I’m Ginnar.”

He couldn’t bring himself to give his true name; not alone out here in the woods, not to a stranger. It was too dangerous. After a moment the boy said cheerfully, “Mother calls me Pup.” it sounded like a lie to Kili, but he didn’t blame the boy. He probably still thought Kili had taken him for a human. “My grandfather had a proper name for me, but Mother said I shouldn’t tell it to people when we’re on the road.”

“Where are you travelling?” Kili asked.

The boy was silent and then finally said, “To visit my second brother. He’s a chief in the eastern mountains. We’re going to live with him. He hasn’t seen me since I was a baby, but his mother is my mother’s sister, so we’ll be safe there.”

“Safe from what?” Kili asked.

There was a note of pride in the boy’s voice as he replied, “From my eldest brother. He wants to kill me.”

Slight echoes told Kili when they’d reached the cliffs. The boy seemed to have taken him to a tall overhang worn into the rock, with a broken, dry floor that angled up into the back of the hollow. Kili found a shrub at the edge of the grass and tied Beef’s reigns to its trunk. “Watch my pony, she gets bored,” he instructed. “Where’s your mother?”

The boy’s shoulder had slipped from his grasp. Kili reached for empty air and stumbled suddenly on bare stones. He heard the pad of footsteps ahead and for a moment the panic returned. This had been a trick after all! They were going to capture him, they were going to use him to lure Fili in, no, he couldn’t let them get him—

But then he heard a soft moan of relief, low and rough beneath pained breathing. The boy was whispering too low for him to make out the words. He called across the shelter. “Mother doesn’t speak Westron very well. I’ll translate.”

“How is she?” Kili asked, fumbling in the saddlebags for the sealed, leather bag in which he carried a roll of clean bandages and a few other supplies. He shuffled across the uneven ground, toeing out the obstacles towards the boy’s voice. “Does she seem sleepy, Pup?” 

“No. She’s too sore to sleep. She says she doesn’t like the look of you, but I told her you’re nice,” the boy answered, which Kili was relieved to hear. If the woman had lost too much blood she wouldn’t be alert enough to insult him. 

“What did you bind her wounds with?”

“My coat.”

He felt a small, skinny hand on his wrist and almost lashed out, but managed to keep himself in check. The boy guided him to a flat piece of ground. Kili could hear the pained breathing of a single adult, and his nose was full of the stink of blood in the warm summer air. 

“Here, clean your hands,” Kili held out his water-skin. “Scrub them until they go pink–… until they feel raw. Not a speck of dirt, alright?”

“I get you,” the boy said, and Kili thought he could hear the roll of eyes in his tone. After a moment of splashing the boy said. “There! Now you can’t see any dirt on them, can you?”

“Very funny,” Kili snapped. “Take the coat off your mother, but carefully, and hold it to the wound if it starts dripping at once,” Kili said. “And if she still has a tunic on, she must that take off as well.”

He heard the boy whispering something, muffled by a hand cupped around his mother’s ear, and a soft reply almost quieter than a breath. The boy reported, “Mother says you are too low of honour to see her with her vest off.”

“Does your mother need further proof that I can’t see her at all? I couldn’t dishonour her even if I wanted to,” Kili waved his hand in front of his face.

“Alright. She’ll do it, but she’s not happy about it.”

“Tell her I already have a woman waiting for me at home, and would never think of any other,” Kili grumbled, pulling out a small bottle of the Iron Hill’s strongest drink. “I want you to take this piece of cloth here in my bag, you see the one? Damp it with this liquor and wash around the wound on your mother’s back as best you can. Right to the edges. Tell her it’s going to hurt a lot.”

“She knows,” the boy said, and Kili heard a hiss from the woman as sticky cloth was peeled away.

“How big is the wound?” Kili asked. “What shape? Is it straight, or curved? Do the pieces of her skin still fit together, or is too much gone?”

The boy described what he saw as he cleaned the wound, his voice shaking a little. His mother gave a cry and, by the sound of it, bit down on her own hand. Kili could hear the boy’s courage beginning to fade as he stuttered over his words.

“Tell me about your brother,” Kili said, to distract him. “Why does he want to kill you?”

The boy’s voice perked up a little. “First Brother thinks I’ll try to be chief one day. That’s why he and Second Brother have been fighting for years. After Grandfather died, Second Brother took a lot of the warriors and went away to the mountains and said he ruled all of the towns there now, and people liked him and said he should be chief of everywhere. First Brother was so angry. Our sister… she shares a mother with First Brother, so she stayed with him, and we stayed with her. We lived in her house. She was his best commander. But she was going to leave him, to go to Second Brother instead, and someone snitched on her. First Brother, he…” the boy’s voice began to crack. “He sent soldiers to the house and they dragged her out, and they… they… they tried to make me watch but Mother grabbed me and we ran when First Brother wasn’t looking. We didn’t have time to take food or anything. We ran away into the night. We’ve been walking for days, I lose count how many.”

“I’m sorry,” Kili said. “About your sister.”

“She didn’t like me all that much, I reckon, but she said she wanted me on her side when I got bigger,” the boy answered. “Only Grandfather really liked me, of all the family. I think the wound’s clean now.”

It seemed like the bear’s claws had left a pair of relatively clean cuts. It had ripped the muscle away from the woman’s shoulder, but Kili thought it was worth stitching. However, trying to explain to a child how to suture a wound as bad as this would be difficult even if Kili could see his work. He might only make things worse. 

“Have you ever seen a cut get stitched, Pup?” Kili asked. “Your sister, maybe?”

“Oh, yes!” the boy said. “The healers have such clever fingers! They let me watch whenever I want.”

“Alright. I have tools and thread here in my bag, in a little flat purse that’s all sealed up. I want you to wipe them all with fresh liquor after you take them out, and after that you must touch them as little as possible.”

Slowly, aware that the woman’s injury was beginning to bleed again and needed dealing with quickly, Kili walked the boy through the procedure. He had no way to tell how well it was going except through the boy’s eyes. He certainly didn’t dare touch the wound and introduce a second pair of hands to the already high risk of infection. He had the boy tie off only a handful of stitches across the two wounds, leaving the scratches on the woman’s arm, and then try to spread Kili’s meager supply of bandages across them both.

“Where is it you want to go?” Kili asked as the boy worked. “I can’t tell you what direction, but I know the lay of the land around here. Perhaps I can help.”

“We were heading for the Black Crest Range,” the boy explained. “Mother knows the way from there. But the forest is new, it grew since she last came this way. Under the trees we got turned around.”

“I know what peaks you mean,” Kili nodded. “You know how to find east, with the sun? You can go that way until you reach a river. Follow that north until you hit the Dragonback Range, it’ll probably take you a day’s walking if your mother feels better. Go west through the foothills for half a day or so until you see a pass with a sheer mountain on one side and two round tops on the other. It’s safe to cross from there into the Heath, but don’t attempt the crossing until you have a whole day ahead of you, it’s too cold to sleep in the open at the top of the pass. I haven’t been there myself, but my brother has, he said the land beyond is flat tundra and you can see the Black Crest from there. I’ll give you some food. Drink from the streams as often as you can.”

He realised the boy had gone totally silent. For a moment Kili wondered if he’d got up and wandered off, and then he heard the boy whispering to his mother. When he stopped, Kili asked, “Can you remember all that? I’ll tell you again before you go.”

“Yes,” the boy said quietly. “I can remember.” 

He whispered the directions to his mother while Kili got up and found his way back to Beef. He pulled supplies out of his bag and returned to where the little family sat. “Here – there’s bread in the box, it’s boring and tough on your teeth but it’ll keep you marching. And you can take my blanket, I’ve got the pony to keep me warm tonight.”

He listened to cautious fingers prying open the tin box of journeybread, sniffing the contects and closing it up again. After another whisper, the boy mumbled, “Mother says she owes a debt to you.”

Kili shrugged. “She owes me no debt. My family holds some custody over these lands. It’s my duty to be a good host.”

He listened to the woman pulling her vest on over the wound and wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. Kili knew that if it festered, she would never make it to the Black Crest Range. The boy would be left alone, and who knew how much further he was from his brother? Would he even survive the grief if his mother died in the wilderness? Kili couldn’t imagine leaving Mama’s body without burying it, leaving her where her face would be eaten by foxes and birds would tears rotting strips from her breasts. But then again, in the face of death and pain he’d already proven himself. He hoped the boy was strong enough as well.

“What about you?” the boy asked. “You didn’t mean for your pony to carry you here alone, did you? Will you find your way back?”

“I told you. My friends are coming for me,” Kili smiled. “You should go before they come. If they see you they might be afraid of you, and do something stupid.”

He heard a sharp gasp from the boy. “I… I don’t know why…”

Kili could imagine him with clarity greater than sight could have provided, his grey skin going pale as his black blood fled the smooth, young cheeks, his sharp teeth hidden behind clenched lips, the too-big shirt hanging from his thin limbs as he crouched over his mother, clutching the journeybread box to his chest. 

“It’s alright, Pup. I knew you were an orc as soon as you first spoke,” Kili raised his hands. “I’m not going to let them hurt you; but it would probably still be safest to go now. I won’t tell anyone I met you, not even if your big brother comes to our doors asking after a lost child.”

The boy made a small, frightened whimper. His mother said something aloud at last, a curse in her own language, and the boy replied quickly to assure her of Kili’s promises. Kili heard her rumble her discontent.

“I’ll tell Second Brother you helped us,” the boy sniffed. “I’ll tell him the dwarves from the solitary mountain protect children and the wounded even though they’re enemies. When he’s chief of the whole tribe, I’ll make sure he remembers that.”

Kili shook his head. “Just take care of your mother,” he muttered.

But there was something else he needed to know. A part of him didn’t want to go near the black, fetid suspicion that had been growing in his mind. He couldn’t keep himself from picking at the scab. “Pup, was your grandfather the chief before your brothers?” he asked. “What happened to your father?”

“Dwarves from the mountain killed him,” the boy said quietly, as if admitting to thieving biscuits from the kitchen. “There was a war and he died in the battle. I don’t remember much about him, I was only little when he went away to the fortress in the forest. Grandfather took me as his ward. When no one else was around he used to say I was cleverer than Father, cleverer than any of his line, and he was going to make me chief one day. But then a dwarf killed him too, so we had to live with Sister, and Mother said I should behave and serve First Brother until I was big enough to fight for myself.”

“And your grandfather,” Kili said, forcing the words out between his teeth. “Did he… was he missing a hand?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “He had one hand, and a claw made of iron for the other.”

Kili was glad he was sitting down on the dusty rock floor. He felt outside of his head, as if touch and sound were now slipping away from him and leaving him in the darkness with only the stench of blood and sand and orcs. 

He thought of the long stretch of his life inside that darkness. He thought of the child in Tauriel’s belly, and how he would never see its face. How he would never see his brother’s beard grow long, never see the crown rest on his golden brow. Never see Erebor in its restored glory, full of dwarves and lit with a thousand, thousand lamps. Because of Azog. Because Azog had enjoyed hurting him, had enjoying gouging the eyes from his face, so that he could send him home and cause more hurt to Thorin Oakenshield, King Under the Mountain. 

And Kili thought that Azog had loved this boy, in whatever way that Azog had been capable of love.

“Did you… know my grandfather?” the boy asked, unable to hide the caution in his tone. Kili imagined he was probably gripping his little knife now, remembering bedtime stories of the wicked, ugly dwarves from the mountain.

“No,” Kili smiled. “I only heard stories of him, nothing more.”

Behind him, Beef gave a whinny and her bridled clinked. Kili turned his head. As the breeze came their way he heard, very distantly, a voice calling his name. He thought it was Fili; he was sure it was Fili, even though he couldn’t yet know whether the bear that the orc-woman had stabbed had killed his brother. 

“You should go,” Kili said, standing up and brushing the dust from his trousers. “Go quickly, before anyone sees you.”

“I will. We will. Let me help you,” the boy took his elbow and led him back to his steed. Kili stroked her neck, listened to hear pawing the ground, perhaps smelling the other ponies. He closed her saddlebags and untied her from the bush.

“Can you climb on her back on your own?” the boy asked from a few feet behind him. Kili could hear his mother swearing as she got to her feet.

“Yes, I’m alright,” Kili gripped the saddle and felt for the strirrup. He heaved himself up onto Beef’s back, almost slipping off and catching the pommel. The sun was out now, shining hot on the back of his neck. He straightened up, put his feet in the strirrups and steadied the pony. “Go, now.”

“Thank you again,” the boy said, standing under the hollow in the cliff. “I will remember you.”

Kili’s face was turned away from him, towards the forest where he could hear his brother’s voice. Beef was straining her neck towards them.

And Kili thought,

_Azog loved this child._

His next thought did not have words, but it crossed from his mind down into his arms and in a snap the bow was in his hand and the arrow was out of the quiver and springing forth. 

Kili heard a noise like a whisper, a little push of air out of a small mouth, and a moment later came the drumbeat of knees hitting dry stone. The orc-woman screamed. The wail grew louder as she ran forward, and then stopped as if she’d hit a wall right where Kili had aimed. He heard her bending over, heard the scuff of a body being heaved up into her arms, her throat scraping over words he didn’t understand; perhaps fear, perhaps denial, perhaps prayers to some flame-crowned god, but more likely than that Kili suspected they were words of comfort from a mother to a child dying rapidly in her arms. 

Then low cries turned to a roar of rage, and he knew she had raised her head and was looking at him now. The low snarl of her curses pricked across his skin like viper’s scales. 

“I don’t know if you understand any of this,” he said, hauling back on the pony’s reigns. “But if you do, go and tell your nephew-chief that the children of Durin will not rest until Azog’s line is destroyed. Tell him to remember that.”

He turned Beef towards the forest and jabbed his heels into her flanks until she broke into a gallop, knowing she would carry him back to the dwarves and ponies she knew. 

 

\---

 

The hunting party had all escaped the bear alive, and mostly intact, though one of the guards would have some impressive scars on his neck to boast about in the pub. Fili was frantic with worry, but Kili made them ride until they reached familiar hunting grounds before he let his brother inspect him. He must have looked more of a mess from the wild ride than he’d realised, and Fili seemed to think he had orc blood on his sleeve; Kili shook his head and insisted it was mud, and that none of his scratches were deep.

“See?” he smiled. “I’m all fine. I was just muddling about getting bored until you found me.”

“Well next time, answer my shouts,” grumbled Fili. “Tauriel will have my guts for harpstrings if I come home without you.”

They went back to Erebor two days early. One of the pheasants had been trampled in the melee with the bear, so their hunt had little to show for the trip. Still, Kili felt giddy with joy when he smelled Tauriel arriving behind him (despite her condition she was still as light on her feet as any elf). He kissed her hand, and then the place between her breasts before she could bend down, and she laughed. He bent his head to kiss her growing belly as well and she pushed him off, giggling even harder.

“You missed me after only a few days?” she asked. 

“Even a moment is too long,” he said.

“And did you have a good hunt?”

Kili shrugged. “It was worth the trip. Let’s not go to dinner with everyone tonight, shall we? Let’s have food sent up to our room. I feel like I deserve some peace and quiet at last.” 

 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading this fic, though I know it was darker than even I usually go in for. Huge thanks also to Flollius for constantly goading my bad ideas in the most supportive ways. 
> 
> I am definitely going to go write something nice now to make up for this.


End file.
